To The Critic
It’s monopoly and / you’re the banker / or craps and it’s / your right hand
literary magazine
It’s monopoly and / you’re the banker / or craps and it’s / your right hand
Remember that timewe reclined in the carand your own wordssplit you in two? It was kind oflike when that cooking show ladywe always watched …
Anne convinces Dad to move into our upstairs guest room, a few weeks after the funeral. He and I haven’t spoken since the night …
“Music is love in search of a word.” – Sidney Lanier Mr.Adam Fisk, high school instrumental music teacher, stood looking out his bathroom window …
I stood tall at thirteen, / they asked me to kiss you / goodbye, it was what / you needed,
In his book, Technopoly, media theorist Neil Postman best describes the love affair tech people have with technology: “They gaze on technology as a …
And all the trembling shadows, the waylaid verses, how darkening they become me now as I lean over this page, the shadows before me …
Like a mermaid’s nipple denied
the sea’s lesser chill,
we harden.
We tighten up.
People often ask me where it all began for me, and I say different things at different times, but usually I say this: It all began for me at Bronx Lebanon Hospital in December of 1970.
I remembered you last week
leaning on the front gate
hair left in a photo album.
Fingers thicker than January wind.
1. The Esopus Creek is a gushing brown torrent this fall from the September rain, but the trees surrounding the creek shimmer with red, …
The Hurt Red-faced, open-mouthed–a silent scream in front of me–you press your small hands to your sides. At six, you live a pain so …
Rogue Sparks Coming this way is cigarette ember, put out on metal receptacle ridge, wetted down with ocean air and admiral fell promises of …
1. The Donnelly Manufacturing Company I was a graduate student. I needed money, a summer job. The clerk at the state unemployment office frowned …
Snow and Crocuses 1. Snow and Crocuses Thanksgiving ahead, and first snows, snows and crocuses, Wordsworthian spring, implying daffodils. But first there’ll be holidays …
The Songbird Market Beijing, a man with the faith of ages Turns to offer a courteous reception. We have come to see about a …
Five weeks after the hospital in Oaxaca called to tell us that Mom had died of complications from a drug overdose, her ashes arrived …
Come Back I will paint you over. I will revise each line. I’ll stand immersed in the dregs without a coat of stones, an …
Munitions Magnanimity The targets for the tolerant came with a gun rack and delayed viral police how-to videos: A ticking clock mock-calm after the …
Prophesies The white blossoms fallen to the furrow rise again and swirl on March breeze past branches bearing the green buds of plums. The …
More Like Horace Under a green and wilted sky, the heat softens and obscures me. Too slack to eulogize my cousin, who died of …
I have bought some of your supplies. Sparse, random: a thin brush and a squat black marker, a half-full bottle of linseed oil, a …
News From North Country The bright-eyed buxom broadcaster in thick makeup her mother never quite taught her to brush on correctly suddenly engulfs and swallows …
I Curse Thee While standing on your head. Like peanut butter. From Carlsbad Cavern. I curse thee in milk. By the string of the …
The psychic held Lydia’s palm aloft, tracing the lines with black nails. Months ago, Lydia would have called bullshit and gone back through the …
growing old at once sober inside the thought of the time you stood on a black cliff, over a black desert, in a martian …
Peccadillo The church bells ring each hour precisely three minutes too soon, and everyone in town shrugs off that resounding, persistent defect, performs the …
Jost had a job to do, and he would do it. He was as old-fashioned and square as a woodcut of a laborer carved …
The Fawn Found dead in the neighbor’s yard a humid morning in July. The flies already at its eyes, its neck bent back over …
Too much August; it must be parceled night by night ingested in slippery hours. Outside the theater we find ourselves lost, wander into the …
For the longest time Nada was two things: one, greenblue peacock eyes that sparkle big whenever she readied herself to say something, and two, …
Egeria densa clogs sloughs, especially during low water. Love is a lie the cup tells the coffee for the mouth. Even the eye can’t …
Excavations 3 A poetry denies its end in any descriptive act, I mean any act which leaves the attention outside the poem. – Robert …
One Moment in the Middle of Things Virginia Beach, the late 80s – dying already. A pale imitation of its former self, the shops …
An apple seed is stuck to a midnight tree branch. It swells and seeps red honey, sticks close to trunk-hollow and bird’s nest. What …
My three best friends in high school were older and a bad influence. There was Pile, who loved Led Zeppelin and Hostess Twinkies. Then …
Avihs || Vishnu Mornings || they disperse || beyond || the corn Fields, || separately. ||Sunday She || throws Her partner’s computer || (midnight) …
I sit above Sostenuto Avenue at my window in a third-floor walk-up. I’ve been on the avenue nigh on sixty years and at my …
To hear the axis of Earth, Earth’s axis – Osip Mandelstam The first time I heard about Paul Celan was many years ago, back …
Folds in an ancient fuselage orchestrate an arrangement of accents. Each accent is an accident. A moist white shirt like a waiting moon sways …
It would be impossible for anyone to lead a more ordinary life than Bobby Parker, whose life was ordinary to the extent that the …
Dead Women in Old Stories Above the hills a starry slate the lights on the coast a necklace weight of faded-flower …
It’s a melancholy chamber, willow wallpaper and a power-steam humidifier trying to spread calm across six pews sulking on either side of a narrow …
Knowing that people used to communicate with each other and express their feelings through hand-written texts made me feel somehow sad for being born …
How disappointed the first flyers must have been to finally rise above the feathery white heavens and not find themselves surrounded by angels but …
View A white petal falls as the bee drinks the Mandarin bloom then moves on. Purple and red tin pots with orange flowers …
At the Corner At the corner of Division & Reclamation where the town is split between chaos & choice, the edge where you look …
Meeting the Resistance In her twenties during World War II she joined the Netherlands resistance and cycled out to meet newcomers dropped by …
Frank felt edgy all week. Preparations for Bennett & Co.’s RESTORE AMERICA fund-raising tour were taking over all his time: petitioning the state for …
Boundaries Lucy, boundaries might be made of Roman stone walls or hedges, but they’re boundaries all the same. I would walk through the English …
1. Revisionist Ministry of the Martians Seared almost scorched, rolling potato eyes and broccoli heads now dead, this medicated dedicated bougie meditator’s Sternoed noodle soul …
Henry Miller’s Typewriter How did you know that I dreamt about Henry Miller’s typewriter last night? Stolid gray Remington, with a bloodshot aura, green …
1 At the window, last night’s words, ashen Against the glass Black petals in the vase, delicate As the hour fading from us Their …
Miss Dolly Bumfrey We bear Muscat To your sick by traction. Making headway at that driving test Was the needles up-and-up. Annihilating two easy-natured …
Rae Armantrout: I put a glose on you Habitat-themed enclosure. Zen-inflected mug. Around the block dogs bark at absence. Habitat (entire poem) ― …
How I Like My Women I like my women slight and frail, bones hollowly light, ribcages pressed like prison bars against the skin. I love …
you ask me how I occupy myself in my dreams well, if I see one I see the rest I am not an optimist …
The Forsythia in Bloom Suddenly in the early spring evening the forsythia bush is aflame with light, a monastery with hundreds of cells. Throughout …
Milton’s Well Predestination stopped her on the road, speeding in some overcommitment, racing impetuous down green skylines, pushing the envelope of the just-possible. On …
For Fred (Veteran’s Day, November 11th, 2004) We miss you, Mr. Rodgers. You told us straight. You were not purple Mr. Rodgers, not an …
1. I will say our secret… a stone holding its own weight we were lovers holding each other warm in the unfolding there was …
By Jupiter! By Bacchus!: Against Humility In the black ooze of the sky, where golden spangling stars alight, Jupiter, alone at its zenith …
Pieta, Detroit He’d been dead an hour when she came, Ambulance waiting, no hurry now. Her oldest boy. She cradled him, Lifeless, nothing like …
Daylilies At Night Lilies which open half-sullen pods in the night As if lightning bugs, the torso’s involuntary Lucent flash, and then the equally …
Not Black & White Joey was swimming in Sulphur Creek, mother can tell because his eyes are yellow, and he reeks of rotten eggs. …
The Midal Charm In a white canoe The river takes her home Tired and alone With her chin on her knees She dreams …
Where The Land Moves On Forever 1. Siringitu, the Maasai named it, the sepia expanse of grassland, and marshes that stretches to a blur …
Mis En Scène: A Wet Season The graceless way in which you wooed me positions itself, transfigures itself into a scene (complete with …
Memento Fr. 1 Aotearoa is the savage place, seeding A heap of broken images, mixing Mortuary photos with life But this went further as …
The Dead Zone North from Kiev, empty roads The light of other summers opens among the pages. In the photograph, your face, …
Bob can play a number of instruments, none of them well. He likes his guitar, an Ovation with a sensual, curving back. The guitar …
Now, this was not one of those cases in which a pig is killed in sacrifice and its private parts are gluttonously coveted …
Eight Months On Time, tidewater near, headlong has ripened you to this glowing fullness, clumsy in dormant love. Nothing can take you back to …
1. The End I went home—after three hungry years, a dozen awful addresses, and too many leftover 60s prophets and 80s mental patients, and …
Venerable Xoratio Rey is now very ill and there is no hope he will be able to live out his dream. That is why …
Rush hour was over but traffic in the city was still bad. The long summer days kept the streets busy. Chuy did not like …
It didn’t announce itself, the difference in the room, but it was there, of that he was positive. It wasn’t the soft caress of …
Abbott, West Virginia, the town with a funny name, was a funny place to live. Needing somewhere to hang for the winter, I settled …
Shards of sunlight flickered off the car’s bumper as it disappeared over a rise in the road. Josh stared at the bright bursts of …
Thirty-five years before he died, a man with straight and thick but graying hair hurried down the worn carpeting of a steep wooden staircase. …
I More excited than she’d ever been before, Ankbanatacha rushed into her parents’ bedroom — feeling indulged as only a loving, guileless ten-year-old only …
In this first summer night in the year of the itch, I watch the rain clouds collide and part in a dance as …
“What kind of a name is Moses O’Reilly?” said Joe Babylon. I didn’t answer him because I was too scared to talk. I was …
Cotton Barbeau thought of himself as both lucky and damn smart. He was called Cotton by everyone who knew him even though he had …
I felt an irritation on my right shoulder and tapped my skin. Something awoke in me. A new sense of awareness overtook me, even …