Poetry |
“Nest”
“I shouldn’t have gotten so close, my breath frosting the glass, // when I’m certain I surprised it, two heads perked up, / and after a moment, flew.”
Fiction |
“Kill Price,” “Lemons” and “Baby Cuz”
“He asks for lemons by saying lemons but his wife says can we have some lemons please. He ignores this, at her trying to tell him what to say in English or how to say it as if he didn’t know how to ask for what he wanted.”
Poetry |
“Swear –,” “Anemone,” and “Paris … Moscow, 1925”
“I — still here / at my bodily outpost — / in this city / of resplendent indifference, / penury, / a feral winter in the soul …”
Poetry |
“Above and Below the Sea” and “King of the World”
“The man in sandals wants all things the sea favors. / In a child’s flowered room a man watches him from a window. / A shark tooth gray and wet winces in his hand.”
Poetry |
“I Know the Truth,” “Two Suns Are Cooling” and from “Take From My Hand, This City …”
“… a cloak will clothe you. And you will rise then, wondrous, covered / with its power, and you will not repent that you loved me …”
Essay |
“Poetry”
“Instead of shouting at or attacking me, she reached up to pat me on the sleeve. ‘Listen, girlie’ she said. ‘I’ve lost my poems. I’ve looked and looked and I can’t find them. Will you help me?'”
Poetry |
“October 6, 2016,” “October 30, 2016,” “[unsent draft]” and “March 1, 2017”
“A man I once loved said forgive me each time he committed even the smallest transgression. / He’d drink the last beer in the fridge and say forgive me as he lowered his body to mine on the couch.”
Poetry |
“Radar,” “Poetic Minimalism,” “Dandelion,” “Impressions of the Empiricist David Hume,” “Illumination” & “High-Speed Train”
“When a leaf falls / skyward —// and proceeds impertinently in its ascent — // it’s time to admit / we are talking about a butterfly.”
Essay |
“The Fly in Blake, in Dickinson, in Marmalade”
“It seems precarious when Blake is invoked as a senior member of a dead poets society that insists on a tradition whose ‘coherent wholeness’ is no longer possible …”
Fiction |
“Snug Harbor,” “They roam the bay unloved,” and “A comet blazed across the sky”
“… and when I turn the map over I see that it tells you nothing about coming ashore, and everything about where to drown.”
Poetry |
“Define an area as ‘safe’ and use it as an anchor,” “What mistakes did you make last time?” “In the syntax of surrender” & “Consider different fading systems”
“Down is a force, a source / of release although dams, aggressively / engineered and financed, work / against this — what’s held inside / is trapped. And harbors a plan / for spectacular escape …”
Essay |
“A More or Less Imperfect World: Reading Merton in Modernity”
“What I long for in this world is an acknowledgment of practice. This is something I am still working on. What, I want to ask people, are you practicing?”
Essay |
“Small Animal Needs”
“Another story: A beautiful young woman smokes a bunch of pot one night and walks one across a four-lane highway with her little girl to the nearest rundown grocery store.”
Poetry |
“On Ghosts”
“Shakespeare’s ghosts suit all / the critics argue. A skeptic, / Catholic, or Protestant / would each leave the Globe / with their idea of ghosts confirmed.”
Poetry |
from “The Ruins of Nostalgia”
“We were wise to flattery, to certainty, to historicity, but we lay down our burdens for all of them. We were wise to ourselves, in every sense. We were wise to hearts, candy or otherwise.”