only after a thorough comparison                   of clutch and diet,              with meager fruit and seed                  regimens avoided                                 (before I attempt a change of nest)                                       …

  Steam rose from the old black Ford. You could see where the engine block had cracked, but not where the auto industry hit the wall-- goodbye DeSoto, goodbye Edsel--…

  I don’t have to go back to my childhood, there’s nothing there I still want: but of miracles left to me, I’d like to restore a look I once…

              … for we know everything that the Argives and Trojans           did and suffered in wide Troy through the gods’ despite.                     Odyssey XII, 189-90 (trans. Lattimore)     Look.…

  You come from behind— press me up against industrial shelves fingers tacky with sugar my arms full thick bricks of butter tumble when you kiss my neck I tug…

             for my son Graham   The room shatters with giggles before your hand’s thin worms burrow my ears. When that fails they hook inside my cheeks and nose.…

  In 1793, during the French Revolution,          Charlotte Corday was executed by guillotine for the assassination          of Jean-Paul Marat. After her head fell into the basket with a sickening          thump,…

            after Baudelaire   Settle down now, sadness. It’s time for bed. You asked for evening. Well, here it is. A fine mist covers the city like dread. It…

  This is a story of fire, ash, and a child falling into a blaze where she singed her side. This is the child, now thirty, now a woman looking…

  The nurses named the machine that breathed for my brother. Tigger had a serial number, but no one used it. When doctors stopped in they would ask how Luke…

                        of waning gibbous & bloody gumption,                                  how good                       you were, all your loony phases                you bet in one basket…

  She was a Swedish translator whose name I don’t remember, but I liked her, half smashed in a little black dress, even as she raised her glass to bash…