Poetry |
“Fool Reversed / Let Go”
“perhaps a great emptiness / is what is needed — / space for the crack / or crevice to sound // its vast sudden / triumph …”
Poetry |
“Smokescreen”
“The audience gasped. / It was all they could do. // My last line sang / into silence …”
Poetry |
“When I Say Clean Your Room,” “When I Say Okay Take My Car,” & “When I Say It’s Your Life“
“Not long ago it all / fell to me, holding her / on my lap at Public Health / when our cheap insurance / wouldn’t cover vaccines.”
Poetry |
“Hate Barrel,” “White On White,” “Twilight” & “Correspondences”
“Silk evening, criminals’ accomplice, / Comes padding like a wolf, sky / Clicking shut like a crypt — / Restless we turn into beasts.”
Poetry |
“Fourfold Amen” and “Aubade Minus Sunup”
“Onstage, it takes the lead / a lot of words to die. Maybe / I, too, am holding a red scarf / to a false wound.”
Poetry |
from Lointaines
“Storyville or Benin City / it could be that we don’t have to describe / but only to return fear / to the place where we found it …”
Poetry |
“Fire Ants” & “An Exultation of Spirit”
“I wish I could say that a surgeon’s knife / in the small of my back and the successful removal / of some extra bone, the liberation of a cornered nerve, / would be enough to jump start me back into the joy of living …”
Poetry |
“Why Sturgeon Leap”
“Could leaping be hard-wired into sturgeon / brains since the late Cretaceous / for no other reason than feeling good, // the way cows face north or south when chewing / their cud, conforming to the earth’s magnetic pull …”
Poetry |
“Ghost” & “Cacerolazo, October 2019”
“Three million pans death-rattle this iron-celled era. // What is a revolution? // We run through the barricades of La Alameda as trash fires glow through tear gas clouds on each corner …”
Poetry |
“1985” and “Once in an Antique Shop”
“Say in a church basement / I worked the can opener around the huge tins / of government meat, while another woman / stirred it into something edible …”
Poetry |
“The Fall Flower Show at Phipps”
“See their elegant forms and the exquisite care needed to restrain their growth, / years of work to send one branch upward …”
Poetry |
“Illinois”
“The first time hatred handcuffed me was at the corner / between Commercial Avenue and Third / where it slammed me on the hood of a patrol car.”
Poetry |
“Airshow”
“A sleek fighter climbs and dives / in mock attacks, slamming the awestruck / crowd with the sledgehammer / of its booming metallic roar.”
Poetry |
“August, Old Brickyard, Chilmark”
“Mother/daughter, / we stage a scenic selfie –– masked // faces foreground, backdrop / chimney of the brick factory ruin …”
Poetry |
“The Supermarket”
“When I read the cashier’s name tag — Penelope — / I think: she must be so lonely. She scans my almond butter, / and I imagine her response: I’m not your cliché.