Poetry |
“Girls Department,” “1961” & “All At Once”
“My wet skirt stuck to the seat. / That breathtaking fist of pain / when the thickened wall I couldn’t see / shed its unbreathing ball of cells …”
Poetry |
“Summer, So Full”
“falcons coasting / on updrafts, / bougainvillea in bloom / and the dark high-res / glimmering indigo …”
Poetry |
“Today My Mother Called to Apologize”
“Nothing else — she wanted to hang up / immediately after. She is 92. I am 64. / When I was 3, she put me in a diaper / to punish me for an accident.”
Poetry |
“Speaker,” “Fierce,” “Confessional” & “Concessions”
“Feral is the name given to what is wild / by what isn’t. Whatever it was that owned me, / that kept me guarded, has vanished, / has let me go …”
Poetry |
Poems from “The Lisa Sequence”
“… The last hour waiting / for clemency that does not come, telephone deadly still, petition / ignored. Last shifting its meaning from final to endure.”
Poetry |
“Duncan Farm November Meditation”
“what died with father / what died with mother / there was more i wanted to know / say again the names of distant places / russia lithuania ukraine”
Poetry |
“Maybe the Messiah”
“Maybe the Messiah not coming is proof enough, Kafka chalks / across the board, that God exists. He’s subbing my eighth-grade / math class …”
Poetry |
“To the Last Bottle in the Back of My Fridge”
“I can quit whenever I want. / But not today, not now, / when you have just coaxed me onto a table / at the bar and now I am spiraling / out of sync with the music.”
Poetry |
“Minsk Elegy”
“In the year 1942 my relative Misha Luditsky, / A student, volunteered to fight the Germans. / He deported Chechens and Crimean Tatars.”
Poetry |
“Three Days,” “Coppice” & “Cicadas”
“I think he didn’t want me to see. He told me to go check the rods. / When I came back, the hare’s jacket was off, his intestines were out, and we baked him on the grill.”
Poetry |
“Chronological Still Life,” “Copy 2” & “Musical Instrument Using Gravity 2”
“I want to paint with / the actual fruit, here on the table, / not a copy but the thing itself — / per Jack Spicer, to make my poems / out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon the reader / could cut or squeeze or taste.”
Poetry |
“Often,” “The way out is to forget” & “All I Float Past, and Below”
“During a neighborhood walk, the pharmacy’s an arm’s length reach — / lipsticks and opioids — I’m quick to avoid the alley running / alongside this moment, knife-lined and spit gobbed …”
Poetry |
“Field Days” & “The Old Mill”
“Last together behind his wood shed, / making out against the worn shingles / until his girlfriend tracked us down, gripping // a pitchfork …”
Poetry |
“Things I Forgot to Tell You”
“At times, I can still be twelve and play alone with nothing to lose but marbles. / At times, there’s a distance between my faces. / One haunts one’s own life.”
Poetry |
“Doxology” & “Great-Grandfather Thacker Talks in My Ear”
“Buzzed on Kool-Aid and ginger snaps, / we build a temple from Popsicle sticks. / My friend Glenda sees Jesus’s face / in a piece of toast …”