I cringe to recall the blue morpho’s pop Zen garden where mistakenly I stomped a butterfly golden koi kept vigil with the speckled flames of their bodies every summer…

  In this city of crows and rose-ringed parakeets, elephants and camels labor down the beach, marionettes tell stories in knotted banyan trees. Old monkeys with young men, men-monkeys in…

  I am musing for amusements, looking for something good. Ancestral spirits back me up. I am searching, and they are heaven-sent. What is beautiful? It lasts an instant. I…

  I drive by first, observing the posted speeds as though I'm looking to live at the end of the street or, season and time of day permitting, I’m hunting…

  Looped on the branch, ominous is the goose’s long neck aglow in morning sunlight, black feathers glossy and sleeked down, beak tapered into the air: a jetty. I do…

  Do you still look and see that it is good? You spoke, then saw what you’d wrought. We are the monster in the mirror, God, your world made of…

  In your dream of what never happened a boy turns away from your grief, and each month’s empty womb tolls a compline to spring. Once you knew time as…

  A faint glint reflected off the steel beneath the paint, then, like connected stars, like a graved fate, a pattern of scratched lines, scored letters, scarred words— I hate…

  If the gullet of a brown man is pink, he must be born of salt. Before hanging, his back must be strict as leather pleated by a cherry knife—blue…

  Her children burn their prayers so they will go out on the wind. She says: Look at this circle this line look at this hand. See these loves these…

  Both male and female, the clasp unhinged, the opening forced, the two hardened halves splay, release, relax; the wet of the neon blue gone dry and grey, one hundred…

  My middle name went down in the Tyrrhenian off Anzio Beach, life jacket filling with the sea. After that, my father, split in half, would sing into the bathroom…