Poetry |
“Strangers in Our Own Earth”
“We have been made into something other: / something ancient, swallowed —// badland curves set from the once of subtropics, / maybe single-celled algae and zooplankton.”
Fiction |
“The Peshaman Fragments”
“When at rest, the mouth often does not relax but returns to a puckered, circular kissing shape that suggests it is at once both open and closed, an orifice of both inbound and outbound potential.”
Literature in Translation |
from Anima
“The body was interspersed and interwoven by veins of light. It / floats in the air. On its gray death shroud it floats high above the city / in the green summer air in the flood of light which pulls along with it / city, hospital, people in raging swirls upward …”
Poetry |
“Circe in the Age of Instagram”
“Nothing is anachronism / if you live forever, it says // in my bio. I started with / carefully composed shots // of the island, sun filtered / through olive grove and arbor …”
Fiction |
“Facts About Bald Men,” “Up On the Roof,” “The Bald Man and His Twin,” “Return of the Kleptomaniac” & “Prayer for Hair”
“I stole the last hair from a bald man. The blackish-gray hair was surprisingly long, maybe three feet in length, and had wrapped around his head several times and dangled down his back.”
Poetry |
“The Kite” & “The Unlikeliness of Empty Spaces”
“This is what it means to be in the now; / release a kite to the wind, / feel the tug of a string, / his small face turns up, / all fascination to the sky.”
Poetry |
“Legacy of Blue,” “Incarnations,” “Incarnation Intercept Sonnet,” “Riven, Driven Back” & “Jacob’s Ladder”
“But to keep vision / intact, I stand back, / asking nothing of it / but the sun’s stance / on the diurnal, / incarnation’s probe / of recurrence, / that fire I walk through.”
Lyric Prose |
“Under the Harsh Light”
“Coming back from the countryside to be a high school teacher, I said, My nose is not pretty, when the school leader said, You have such beautiful eyes.”
Poetry |
“A Reading from the Epistle of Horace the Paralytic at Corinth”
“Thus, our Lord / spoke even me, Horace Parlan — // Horace the Paralytic — / into historical bones.”
Lyric Prose |
“Uranus’ OKCupid Profile”
“Why all this emphasis on having a solid surface? What’s wrong with being a mass of churning liquid? What even is a surface anyway?”
Poetry |
“The Garden State”
“I keep an artificial hydrangea in my vase, / its pale blue shot-through with khaki. // In Jersey, we called them snowballs, / so much fuller than roses, so weirdly azure …”
Poetry |
“Half the Hour” & “Measure”
“For a poem ‘Close Is Far and Figured’ I plotted stanzas and rhythm / simply to fulfill the title // “Close is far” back then was a sad young man on the crowded F train / his thumb slowly swiping texted photos of his mother …”
Poetry |
“Broken Coffee Break”
“I stroll up to my favorite out-of-town coffee shop/ and find it closed for good. Through the black glass,/ a naked counter, stools scattered, space thrown open / to conjecture and rats, stillness, indifference.”
Lyric Prose |
“Breakfast,” “The Summit” & “The Red Bike”
“It was Tuesday, Tuesday with no Wednesday to follow, no Monday to precede. The hour hand on the clock whirled like a propellor, so fast it stood motionless. The second hand inched forward, unbearably slow.”
Poetry |
“The ‘Gfit'”
“… it was early in the pandemic,/ even though I thought maybe it was getting / towards the end of the pandemic, / and I didn’t have cancer, or if I did, / I didn’t know I had cancer …”