Poem Without a Title
A figure sits quietly on the shadowed earth
underneath the spreading branches of
the tree of the mind. Through long night
an owl calls with spaced out singular
cries. It …
A figure sits quietly on the shadowed earth
underneath the spreading branches of
the tree of the mind. Through long night
an owl calls with spaced out singular
cries. It …
The last late rain-scaled light has swum
along the office wall.
An aggrieved
mosquito-whine of all you’ve not achieved …
Britney Spears, I can hear the static
you make from here. The bass line
beams low and clear across state lines,
they say. Do you miss indifferent
gas station attendants …
Let’s have a compote duel:
Sweet against sweet
Liqueur against liqueur
Conceptually, I love you
Earthy truffle oil
The pressure to be with you …
On a too hot bus, my sister and I traveled through fields of sunflowers.
Because we couldn’t stop arguing, we sat rows apart.
I see us staring out the windows. Or eating the food we took …
after Samiya Bashir
Long: a measurement; the distance it takes to remember.
Remember: everything that had to fall.
Fall: the end of summer’s tyranny. …
I find her seated at the kitchen table at two a.m.,
her red dress a large heart in the dark’s chest.
I flip the light switch: she stares past the empty …
I have buried my share and hardly anyone knows.
A house must hold ghosts, writing
Names across funereal woods and windows …
Hugging you’s hard enough when you’re awake,
but to worm my arm under your downed trunk,
plutonium-core sequoia, and hold on? Pft. …
In the airless, fluorescent lung of a department store,
I am trying not to laugh at the wolf’s face
printed across the crotch of a pair of boxer briefs.
I nearly buy them, but decide I’m not ready to
forget the joke. For how, out of necessity, they’d fall
eventually into regular rotation, become my wolf …
I woke to rain
and wondered if that meant
the sky was trying
to be a prayer. Teary-eyed
and drooping are the clouds
inside my voice …
Make me write like a dog
gnawing a bone. Not anger,
but that animation, that knowing
focus and breath. The just as easy
letting go,
down into the dirt, …
after Forrest Gander’s ‘Deadout’
I.
Procure his bone-dry clay & burnish,
synchronous glide and precision. …
The children have left the red ball
disintegrating in the backyard.
Half-gone, it’s a dimpled dome
for dead grass, brittle and yellow— …
& the trees gleam wetly under the luminous clouds
& through a water-ribboned window a child draws pictures …
I recalled for the therapist a rabbit skin I bought
At summer camp, at the camp trading post,
When I was nine or ten using cash my parents
Sent with me my first trip away from home.
I waited a long time to get the rabbit skin,
Waited in line a long time for the popular item,
The most popular item for sale, and in the rush …
On the one side
there are hummingbirds
plucking secret fruits
from the tongues of foxgloves
& a shimmering woman …
I’ve only seen them build nests on underpasses, on buildings, in the shadows of London Bridge— …
I am soft with healing after
I am luxuriant with good fortune after
I am cloaked by lady beetles a scent of salted olive, my nature after …
makes simple nests in caves or clefts eats large amounts of carrion
especially susceptible to poisoning was poached almost to extinction …
for Panella
It was too generous for gunshots,
too casual for fireworks. Our house …