Poetry |
“Myers-Briggs” & “Minivan Mafia”
“I took a personality test that claimed I was a passionate idealist, so I printed off the results and flossed my teeth with them because I refuse to be compartmentalized into eight different traits like deli meat tubs at a sandwich shop …”
Poetry |
“The reign of dinosaurs ended in spring”
“Whatever worldlings mutation made, / the eons hatched endings: immolation, ice. / Only our latest extinction arrived // from without, a sentence tied to a stone …”
Poetry |
“Poem Begun on a Map of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery” & “August”
“Headlights in daylight, / I scrawl in the blank space / by the Old Croton Aqueduct, where I stand / looking down on the graves, / the hearse, the procession of headlights.”
Poetry |
“Wyoming” & “The Baker’s Wife”
“Each hold tools of the literate — / he the volumen, the scroll, she / the wax tablet and stylus. / But oh, how the experts go on …”
Poetry |
“Nancy With the Laughing Face”
“I can hear her sloshing in the bath. / The phone rings. Ma yells, ‘It’s your boyfriend.’ / She bursts out still wrapping herself in a towel.”
Poetry |
“That Winter,” “Unshed Tears and the Snow” and “Do You Dare?”
“That winter when the night sky was violet, I was sure I would remember it, / and the sight of unbroken snow in the morning, I would remember that too …”
Poetry |
“Little Speech” & “Spring Summer Fall Winter”
“Undesirable you may have become, wept over / by no one, your green age passed by. / Don’t you remember the first chill / in the fires wasting August, / our last great season?”
Poetry |
“Martial Arts” & “Coming Back”
“At the start of every lesson the teacher / asks, What’s your best defense // in a dark alley? Upstairs our son swings / his legs, kicking neatly like a clock // at the quarter hour …”
Poetry |
“Dad and the Eye Exam” & “Milk Run”
“My chin rests in this little sling / and I let you come back from the dead. // Go ahead, sit by the magazine rack / as the optometrist taps our history // into the record …”
Poetry |
“I Do Not Always Feel Sad When I Think About Humankind’s Eventual Mass Extinction”
“Today in the park, roses / dormant, the foliage all / undressed for the wretched / months to come, my daughter / waving from her stroller / at squirrels, I heard the hawks / circling …”
Poetry |
“Growing Up in the Mouth of the Wolf”
“Firearms enforce the wolf’s freedom. A boy/must learn to be/a wolf. //The wolf swallowed me. The men/of my childhood hated. They ate/with their eyes.”
Poetry |
“Dream Song” & “Born Again”
“From our team leader with secrets / I felt the graze of her gaze on my legs, / I grew lean, played guitar and drew portraits, / inhaled the scent of roses …”
Poetry |
“King Street”
“The noise / from the Greek / restaurant downstairs // subsides, leans / into the shoulder / for the walk home, // a little quiet, / a little drunk …”
Poetry |
“Year of the Snake”
“My long-ago Braille teacher / suspected me of peeking at the little / bumps on the page. I was flattered / And also insulted.”
Poetry |
“The Zone of Instability,” “Bevy of Beauties Blacking Out” & “This Wee Lock”
“The photo displays some of the 73 members of SHARE (Share Happily and Reap Endlessly), an organization of movieland housewives who put on a minstrel show to build a diagnostic clinic for retarded children …”