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 →
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.
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
One day even glittery vagabond princes fade into sepia. Images stay: elegant long-necked canvas men keep burning. Charcoal women, naked except for their stockings, remain as vital as ever. And stories stay warm in our mouths: Schiele’s drawing ignited by an outraged judge over a candle flame; Modigliani born under a pile of silver and damask because by law, no… Read more →
Take a walk in the hill’s beard of seeding grasses. Insects rise up with an electric buzz like the cry of an apartment call-button. I am not at home in this body. Further down, near the lake, bullfrogs twang their low strings. Raise my foot over an inch of warm water and tadpoles dash around so frantically I’m… Read more →
If every poet on earth stopped writing right now, forever, what would be lost? Bubbles fall through the water, each containing a choice. This is a test of your artistic commitment. Once they were a long cold drink. Now fountains are ornamental. Who needs this monument? Perhaps lovers, concealing themselves behind white noise in fragrant jardins d’amour. Travelers… Read more →
Deep inside the cave, a red ochre animal gallops across the wall. She painted it to summon food. She painted it to banish nightmare. The painting is a lamp that shines on the maker and sometimes the stranger who wanders into silence with a shiver. It’s all about what you’re not supposed to see: the body’s inner pink. A… Read more →