Poetry |
“How I Became a Bird” & “Cabbage Soup”
“My father kept a Rosary in his pocket. / He was known for giving away inexpensive / holy medals and pocket prayer beads. / At one point he handed out gold-colored / lapel pin doves.”
Poetry |
“Saturn Return” & “Fragment Found in a Ballot Box”
“… The stark order of sex / disagrees with me. I like to stay home / and make up mysteries, like we did that winter / the rain kept changing to snow and back again.”
Poetry |
“The Theory of the Multiverse”
“I live uptown I live / downtown I live all around / say goodbye to the mythopoeic / no more receiving holy orders / just remember to pay attention”
Poetry |
“A Way to Restore Beauty to the Universe” & “A Garden, Post-Catastrophe”
“… we spoke to a copper sundial to call on womankind, / our sisters in the desert, our mothers on the coast / evoking laughter not yet forgotten in a season of grief –”
Poetry |
“What’s The Past Like?”
“But / now I recall the sound a gray bird // made to wake me from a crazed dream. / Like a scratch awl with its fluted wooden // handle chipping bark off an oak tree.”
Poetry |
“Autobiography of Melancholy” & “Silence”
“All day I was drugged with sadness. / Asleep, my fists curled like thoughts unspoken. // I am a realist bothered by reality. / Someone who dreams with eyes wide open.”
Poetry |
“Eternal Summer”
“Split a penny in half and use it twice / he jokes, gesturing at $6.99 / neon laundry detergent jugs, dented. / I couldn’t afford these back then.“
Poetry |
“Primum Mobile”
“Without / heat, a drop of water would / bounce, forever, and a heart would simply / jangle, eternal bell.”
Poetry |
“Lucky Man” & “Stella D’Oro”
“And he’d earned one stamp at least, because, // he said to Val, just making sure, those cans of soup / she was ringing up were five for $5, and he bought ten …”
Poetry |
“magnificent height” & “[and what we have come to, says ‘childless’]”
magnificent height here in the non-light of evening i am not magnetic or ringed or blue like a sliver no sentiment arrives and the ceiling is one magnificent height and the man at the restaurant says he will buy me all 63 of saturn's moons to get away with something…
Poetry |
“For Our Fathers Teetering in Retirement” & “Quarry”
“Leisure escapes me / when I look straight at it. Only work / of a certain kind appeases me. A phase / I think I’ll pass through. Get ready, / says the snapper, for what comes after.”
Poetry |
“The Reader,” “A Snail,” “The Rabbits” & “Anniversary”
“As a child I ate rabbit, though I didn’t know it. My father / kept them in hutches along our high back fence. //. We fed them a bit, but mostly kept away — the mothers / would eat the babies if we bothered them too much, he told us.”
Poetry |
“Blue Oracle” & “We Forgot”
“I was born into violence, of word, / of body, but we did not speak of it outside our house. / We never spoke of it inside either. I didn’t know / what happened there happened elsewhere …”
Poetry |
“Poem In Which I Insist This Is A Good Day“
“The textile mills in my hometown / in Rhode Island are mostly dead. My parents are both dead. They wore / heart monitors with sticky tape and both took Coumadin / which thins the blood.”
Poetry |
“Imperial Virus (Scarab)”
“… He had affixed himself / to the side of my sandal like a brooch. / As I realized who he was, I could feel I was about // to be frightened: stopped myself.”