Work
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 & Ancient Horses
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 …
Judith in Old Age & Other Poems
The Songbird Market Beijing, a man with the faith of ages Turns to offer a courteous reception. We have come to see about a …
The Fey Daughter
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 & Loom
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 …
Scapegoat Borough and other poems
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 & Fire and Rain
Prophesies The white blossoms fallen to the furrow rise again and swirl on March breeze past branches bearing the green buds of plums. The …
Not Art but Apery
More Like Horace Under a green and wilted sky, the heat softens and obscures me. Too slack to eulogize my cousin, who died of …
Unfinished
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
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 …
Tough Luck
I Curse Thee While standing on your head. Like peanut butter. From Carlsbad Cavern. I curse thee in milk. By the string of the …
Some New Sky
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 …
Hjörleifshöfði
growing old at once sober inside the thought of the time you stood on a black cliff, over a black desert, in a martian …
A Small Grief & Other Poems
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 in the Machine
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 …
Fawn & Great Grandfather
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 …
Ann’s Visit
Too much August; it must be parceled night by night ingested in slippery hours. Outside the theater we find ourselves lost, wander into the …
Nada Among the Epics
For the longest time Nada was two things: one, greenblue peacock eyes that sparkle big whenever she readied herself to say something, and two, …
DELTA 4: BEFORE DEPARTING FOR LAS POZAS WITH EDWARD JAMES MY SON SCHOOLS ME ON STRETCH ARMSTRONG
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 & Night Journey
Excavations 3 A poetry denies its end in any descriptive act, I mean any act which leaves the attention outside the poem. – Robert …
Intentions Against Translation and Other Poems
One Moment in the Middle of Things Virginia Beach, the late 80s – dying already. A pale imitation of its former self, the shops …
Garage Sale Wedding
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 …
The Big Waitress
My three best friends in high school were older and a bad influence. There was Pile, who loved Led Zeppelin and Hostess Twinkies. Then …
Modern Metaphysics
Avihs || Vishnu Mornings || they disperse || beyond || the corn Fields, || separately. ||Sunday She || throws Her partner’s computer || (midnight) …
Sostenuto Avenue
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 …
Poetic Meridian of Paul Celan
To hear the axis of Earth, Earth’s axis – Osip Mandelstam The first time I heard about Paul Celan was many years ago, back …
Mother Tongue
Folds in an ancient fuselage orchestrate an arrangement of accents. Each accent is an accident. A moist white shirt like a waiting moon sways …
Surfing in Catal Hyuk
It would be impossible for anyone to lead a more ordinary life than Bobby Parker, whose life was ordinary to the extent that the …
from Maquettes for a Season of Fury
Dead Women in Old Stories Above the hills a starry slate the lights on the coast a necklace weight of faded-flower …
Rinda’s Moniker
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 …
Finding their letters
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 …
Storm Flight
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 & Spring – Poems
View A white petal falls as the bee drinks the Mandarin bloom then moves on. Purple and red tin pots with orange flowers …
Down to the Desert & At the Corner
At the Corner At the corner of Division & Reclamation where the town is split between chaos & choice, the edge where you look …
Empty Towns and Other Poems
Meeting the Resistance In her twenties during World War II she joined the Netherlands resistance and cycled out to meet newcomers dropped by …
The Piano Player
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 …
My Father’s Axe and Other Poems
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 …
Midwest Storm Cellar Sequence
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 …
Downtown Shadows & Other Poems
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 …
Water Harp
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 …
Four Poems
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 …
from Broken Glosa
Rae Armantrout: I put a glose on you Habitat-themed enclosure. Zen-inflected mug. Around the block dogs bark at absence. Habitat (entire poem) ― …
Try This On – Three Poems
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 …
A Painting Balla Called Flight of the Swallows
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 etc.
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 etc.
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 etc.
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 …
Fragments of the Human Heart
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! etc.
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
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 etc.
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 And White etc.
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 etc.
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
Where The Land Moves On Forever 1. Siringitu, the Maasai named it, the sepia expanse of grassland, and marshes that stretches to a blur …
To Theseus and Other Poems
Mis En Scène: A Wet Season The graceless way in which you wooed me positions itself, transfigures itself into a scene (complete with …
Evidence of Obsession
Memento Fr. 1 Aotearoa is the savage place, seeding A heap of broken images, mixing Mortuary photos with life But this went further as …
Resurrection Suite
The Dead Zone North from Kiev, empty roads The light of other summers opens among the pages. In the photograph, your face, …
Head Up, Chin Down Straight
Bob can play a number of instruments, none of them well. He likes his guitar, an Ovation with a sensual, curving back. The guitar …
The Magic Orgy of the Pig
Now, this was not one of those cases in which a pig is killed in sacrifice and its private parts are gluttonously coveted …
Five Poems
Eight Months On Time, tidewater near, headlong has ripened you to this glowing fullness, clumsy in dormant love. Nothing can take you back to …
The Autobiography of Somebody Else
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 …
Bone White Death
Venerable Xoratio Rey is now very ill and there is no hope he will be able to live out his dream. That is why …
La Estupidez de Cosas
Rush hour was over but traffic in the city was still bad. The long summer days kept the streets busy. Chuy did not like …
One Oh For Tilly
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 …
A Wink For Luck
Abbott, West Virginia, the town with a funny name, was a funny place to live. Needing somewhere to hang for the winter, I settled …
The Nickel
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 …
The Strongest Man In The World
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. …
The Sex of Angels / O Sexo dos Anjos
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 …
The Year Of The Itch
In this first summer night in the year of the itch, I watch the rain clouds collide and part in a dance as …
Moses and Joe
“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 …
Turning Over a New Leaf
Cotton Barbeau thought of himself as both lucky and damn smart. He was called Cotton by everyone who knew him even though he had …
From Retelling
I felt an irritation on my right shoulder and tapped my skin. Something awoke in me. A new sense of awareness overtook me, even …
ACME Short
Third day out, the oddest feeling overtook me. A hybrid of nostalgia and deja-vu, this fuzzy childhood sense-memory of melancholy bliss. I wanted to …
The Most Natural Thing In The World
The note, if one word could be referred to as such, was on eggshell-blue stationery, and had come in a neat blank envelope, slipped …
The Whistle Blowing
Christian Gimel was killed by a falling stand-up piano on the day The Dyke was painting the staircase in her apartment building. A chic …
Checkerboard Conscience
“Aren’t we quaint — sitting around this stage prop of a country store with a leaky pickle barrel as our centerpiece? Reminds me of …
Quentin at Peace
September 1, 1970 ImageI have lived here for the past fifteen years eight of them alone save for Jason and Carruthers. They’ve endured as …
Fishing The Moody River
Each morning she stood on the bank casting her line into the water and reeling it in slowly as white smoke curled around her …
Berlin Letter
Dear A, I’ll keep adding to this as I go along. Maybe by the time I finish it, I’ll have an address for you …
Maine Letter
The October edition of POETRY featured an annoying sequence of petulances entitled, collectively, “Antagonisms,” none more excruciating than earnest Eavan Boland’s cautious, provisional confession of failure to bond …
Haiti Brief
Almost 10 years have passed and Jean-Bertrand Aristide has failed to improve the lot of the Haitian people who trusted him so completely in …
The Azizam Poems
the trembling that day in iran you weighed a honeydew’s weight when you first took thick milk from your dune-gold mother, purblind with sucking, …
To Sidney’s Defense etc.
TO SIDNEY’S DEFENSE The erected wit with its complete set of screws and mock I-beams and moist whimsy fluid in its jests, sit on …
Pronomial Adjective
i. her, one perspective, is secular and simple with blue plastic eyes and split thumbprints. and, in a word her is ambiguous like variety flower …
A Pacific Vagrant etc.
A PACIFIC VAGRANT And so, in travel, I made my mind treasonable in every way, In treason to say I had eloped all those …
Three Poems
TWAS it was was a translucid partition between the consciousness here below: forfeiting all things-light she goes back over the world of the world …