Poetry |
“Minsk Elegy”
“In the year 1942 my relative Misha Luditsky, / A student, volunteered to fight the Germans. / He deported Chechens and Crimean Tatars.”
Poetry |
“Three Days,” “Coppice” & “Cicadas”
“I think he didn’t want me to see. He told me to go check the rods. / When I came back, the hare’s jacket was off, his intestines were out, and we baked him on the grill.”
Poetry |
“Chronological Still Life,” “Copy 2” & “Musical Instrument Using Gravity 2”
“I want to paint with / the actual fruit, here on the table, / not a copy but the thing itself — / per Jack Spicer, to make my poems / out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon the reader / could cut or squeeze or taste.”
Poetry |
“Often,” “The way out is to forget” & “All I Float Past, and Below”
“During a neighborhood walk, the pharmacy’s an arm’s length reach — / lipsticks and opioids — I’m quick to avoid the alley running / alongside this moment, knife-lined and spit gobbed …”
Poetry |
“Field Days” & “The Old Mill”
“Last together behind his wood shed, / making out against the worn shingles / until his girlfriend tracked us down, gripping // a pitchfork …”
Poetry |
“Things I Forgot to Tell You”
“At times, I can still be twelve and play alone with nothing to lose but marbles. / At times, there’s a distance between my faces. / One haunts one’s own life.”
Poetry |
“Doxology” & “Great-Grandfather Thacker Talks in My Ear”
“Buzzed on Kool-Aid and ginger snaps, / we build a temple from Popsicle sticks. / My friend Glenda sees Jesus’s face / in a piece of toast …”
Poetry |
“Myers-Briggs” & “Minivan Mafia”
“I took a personality test that claimed I was a passionate idealist, so I printed off the results and flossed my teeth with them because I refuse to be compartmentalized into eight different traits like deli meat tubs at a sandwich shop …”
Poetry |
“The reign of dinosaurs ended in spring”
“Whatever worldlings mutation made, / the eons hatched endings: immolation, ice. / Only our latest extinction arrived // from without, a sentence tied to a stone …”
Poetry |
“Poem Begun on a Map of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery” & “August”
“Headlights in daylight, / I scrawl in the blank space / by the Old Croton Aqueduct, where I stand / looking down on the graves, / the hearse, the procession of headlights.”
Poetry |
“Wyoming” & “The Baker’s Wife”
“Each hold tools of the literate — / he the volumen, the scroll, she / the wax tablet and stylus. / But oh, how the experts go on …”
Poetry |
“Nancy With the Laughing Face”
“I can hear her sloshing in the bath. / The phone rings. Ma yells, ‘It’s your boyfriend.’ / She bursts out still wrapping herself in a towel.”
Poetry |
“That Winter,” “Unshed Tears and the Snow” and “Do You Dare?”
“That winter when the night sky was violet, I was sure I would remember it, / and the sight of unbroken snow in the morning, I would remember that too …”
Poetry |
“Little Speech” & “Spring Summer Fall Winter”
“Undesirable you may have become, wept over / by no one, your green age passed by. / Don’t you remember the first chill / in the fires wasting August, / our last great season?”
Poetry |
“Martial Arts” & “Coming Back”
“At the start of every lesson the teacher / asks, What’s your best defense // in a dark alley? Upstairs our son swings / his legs, kicking neatly like a clock // at the quarter hour …”