In the Biblio
Of course, my timepiece was made out of scissors and you cut the hands with still more hands. You knew I was hankering for a pale rose or a nose- gay to stitch along a minor work of Pliny* at, say, dusk? Of course,… Read more →
The Tree Outside
How can you know you’ve survived? The hands still move, the feet, the heart though the mouth is frozen shut. I am taking the groceries out from the bag. I am putting the dishes Into the sink. I am sweeping under The table, and the tree outside, with its bare braches, sways gently in the wind. The children come in,… Read more →
Stepmother
1. Close your eyes and count to spring. Then, ready or not: grind us into flower, shove us in the oven to bloom like bread. Brother, I have seen her impatient at the window rosemary in her hand like a votive branch. 2. It is not my house anymore with its pinebox smell. She has redecorated my children with bruises… Read more →
Foxwife
after Anne Sexton’s “Housewife” Some women marry foxes. She wears her furs around the house, red as a fever, blood under the fresh manicure. See how she prepares the meal: rabbit for lunch, rabbit for dinner. Men come home hungry as hounds after the chase. A woman is the hunter. That’s the main thing.
List Baby
I keep forgetting things. You, for example, who I tagged “important” with a yellow star but never followed up— too busy flinging myself face-first into the space jam before checking the expiration date. And just as the bossa nova rhythm really hits its elliptical love trot… Read more →
Things I Believed in the Back Seat
That I would spend my life listening to five cassettes while fighting the seatbelt of a blue Chevy Nova, that Peter, Paul and Mary wrote their songs with my mother in mind, and I was her lemon tree, that the distant refineries lit up in the Texas night were carnivals, and I could hear the delightful terror of children’s screams… Read more →
In the Night of the Big-Game Hunter’s Granddaughter
Trophies open and close their glass eyes. A little steam & then the Wildebeest and the Water Buffalo step out of the wall—, that wood-paneled pond. Hoary beards, white ghost shivers, trampling the guest sheets, buckling the thin mattress. It is not quite Thanksgiving. Just shy. She gazes toward the guns on high racks, the fold-out couch retracts, and from… Read more →
Take the Present Time
They are building a 10,000-year clock. Or they already built it, or it is in the works. I saw the article online; I didn’t read all of it. I was distracted by Shakira and her hips On YouTube, a video of her singing With Wyclef in an awkward duet performed Live in China and now broadcast In my bedroom on… Read more →
maybe it’s just me
when the end of the world fails to arrive nothing for it but to solstice on December dropping darkness shortened days short focus sending weak rays more readable sometimes half-past apocalypse quarter-to skating first only snowfall fifteen inch blizzard swallowed by open lakes their wide mouths speaking muted volumes but we keep spinning half- life of my attention span shortening… Read more →
Labyrinth 44
The boy in the labyrinth is tired of looking. There is a boy in the sky. The boy above coaxes his big shadow into a widening circle, encompassing the boy in the labyrinth. Between the two, an image–shadow over the face of one, shadow covering the body of the other. Sunlight behind the head of the boy in the sky,… Read more →