Poetry |
“Ode to Teased Hair”
“I spend a lot of money to look this cheap, Dolly Parton twanged / in her white suede mini-skirt and fringed jacket, her lips / a gobsmacking vermillion, her wig teased like a halo in San Marco.”
Poetry |
“Charred Circle” & “Poem About My Gender and Other Topics”
“My thoughts adhered to the blameless, blasted continent/ Untallied sites of immolations. Massacres / Some are beside freeways.”
Poetry |
“Aubade with Elsewhere & All,”
“a fluted / glass bottle stamped MILWAUKEE, / the glossed square of a magazine page, / which, unfolded, reveals Kathy Ireland / in a green bikini. With both hands the boy / closes — he nearly trembles — the rust-bitten / lid …”
Poetry |
“Renewal” & “Bouquet”
“I’ve got nothing better to do / than wait for the recycle truck / so I can reclaim my barrel –– blue, / taller than a first grader, full.”
Poetry |
“September Equinox”
“Let’s rename all our bones, he says, let’s fuse our skeletons together. Let’s become one whole new creature. And so, the old name was wrist. The new name is narrow. The old name was hip. The new name is sparrow.”
Poetry |
“Post-Mortem”
“I’ve never wanted my own body, never valued it. / To cut is proper, to forget, divine. // Mittens stippled with snow. Runners of a sled. / Tracks of a child’s destiny.”
Poetry |
“In Search of Eden at the New York Botanical Garden” & “Objective Correlative”
“In the leaflet, I read of Kusama’s love of nature. Think of Aristotle declaring art as imitation / of nature, think of artifice. // In the native plant section, my friend Dominic introduces me to the flora and foliage by name. / I follow his eye like a monarch butterfly skimming the goldenrod.”
Poetry |
“Hell’s Half Acre”
“I almost missed the sign which, along with chain / link fencing, was all that set the place apart from the miles / we’d already driven. So much spectacular // sameness begins to numb a person.”
Poetry |
“The Silence”
“All were denounced / as party pariahs & traitors / & the White House attorney // said in public that one / ‘should be shot.'”
Poetry |
“Dido Sotiriou Says Farewell Anatolia, Over and Again”
“Let’s say two million Greeks were never expelled / from Asia Minor. That her protagonist, Axiotis Manolis, // could stay in Turkey and quietly farm / what he was certain would be his small plot // of everlasting life …”
Poetry |
“How I Know We Come From Oceans” & “You Have to Swallow the World”
“But the world is hard, weighted / by concrete, sharp with bayonets / and belfries, in each bite, shards.”
Poetry |
“Crown Shyness”
“We approached some fragile union, / but it could not be sustained. You threatened secrets / I already knew. You missed the house wren’s song / because you kept talking.”
Poetry |
“Outside the Maximum-Security at Dannemora” & “Calendar”
“Women hunch over bags / of candy, soap, gallons of soda / and kids — / all they’ll carry inside. // Wet sneakers slide / through slush, / devoted, slow.”
Poetry |
“Courses”
“The first time I ate rhubarb Mom and I went out to the patch / beside the old hog shed to pick it, twisting and pulling it up / from the root, we sat on the stoop while she cut the stalks away / from the fronds …”
Poetry |
“Live Webcam: Ponte delle Guglie, Venice; March 2020”
“Just two people, now three, and a dog at / the end of a leash. I keep waiting for / something to happen. A bomb. A bullet.”