Ms. Pearl’s son turned on her Christmas lights so no one would know she’s not there— a row of electric candles in the window flicker blue, gold, blue again.…

  The water element she builds in the back yard resembles a sarcophagus.   A terrier owned by a neighborhood widower falls in and drowns.   A frog lives in…

  I watched the film slumped unaware of watching our own film that was also made of skin and light, like before when the glass particles that shattered in midsummer…

  The whole sky is hunched. An intransitive thirst.   Talking a foreign language is like wearing borrowed clothes.   Helga confuses the words for land and landscape (who would…

  Three body bags of crumpled plastic and extension cords trail like entrails spilling beside the doublewide of Art and Esther who plot our holiday into full (af)frontal curbside pageant,…

  My processor is stuck. I need tea. I want a human on the other end of the phone, not some asphalt envelope voice that says I’m a vegetable.  …

  I might have been born to write your elegy. The moment I lift my pen your soft knock will be heard at the door. For fifty years or more…

        (1)       The Wyndham Sisters       John Singer Sargent, 1899   Cream-colored, both the plush brocade-covered couch       where two…

  The pounding begins / like the old war drums / in my ears. I can   hear your heart / as you watch me / from outside my exhibit:…

  Make me the copper sun of Golgotha, the shivering of the sperm whale just       after mating. Make me the coupling link cuffing your shirt, one of…

  Everyone will be your love at the church bazaar, at the psychic fair where we have arrived too late, and the fortune tellers have become annoyed by questions and…

  False labor, a fist binding my womb to your skin to your ribs to your heart, and it feels not like practice to have you out   but a…