Poetry |
“Fitting the Profile” & “Traffic Report”
“The peculiar smell in the back / of a cop car is not old cum or stale perfume. / It’s Fear 101 or Advanced Fear, or both. / How many hands against how many / cars, how many cuffed, how many heads / shoved down into that seat?”
Poetry |
“Concrete Pastoral”
“… a Target parking lot’s grey order punctured / by the aquiline nose of an unhoused man / late in his seventies, belted neat in khakis, pulling // a carry-on …”
Poetry |
“Calle del Desengaño, Antigua, Guatamala”
“Someone is burning chaff, / someone is burning garbage, someone / is singing to a radio ranchera. / Animals are crying in a far corral // as they do before an earthquake.”
Poetry |
“River Bride”
“There’s a continent inside our bodies / built from the attar of Eve, a small boat in the river / of our veins & a burned-out church at the fourth fold // in the wrist.”
Poetry |
“Ode on a Field in Norwich, Vermont”
“We have staked out this grass to save us / from certain death. We crush / our crime-scene-outline backs against it weightfully.”
Poetry |
“Purchase” & “Dragonfly”
“The panties arrived by mail, // flat and overlapping on blue / cardboard like four open-winged birds // on a rectangle of sky.”
Poetry |
“Story Time in Shestakove” & “For the Poets”
“Small groups of children gather / in the colors / of song and tattered flags.”
Poetry |
“Christmas Songs”
“The swimming pool lies under its moldy, canvas top. / Faded poinsettia leaves, brown over white, / struggle into a February that sees / roses bend their necked stems in silent death throes.”
Poetry |
“The God of Love Never Says It’s Complicated“
“Is that where your boyfriend’s body bounced // from the car into a patch of bushes? / You say, I wasn’t even drunk, but blinded, // stated mildly, matter of fact and of record.”
Poetry |
“At Gramma’s House” & “On East 38th Street”
“Peek outside the door to the backyard, / there’s a quad of dead shrubs, cat skeletons, / and nopal cacti a father trims for nopales. / Dead children become sediment, a red moon / hovers over a river.”
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.”