untitledseducing the writer is pointless;he'll seduce himselfif you're silent.
the all goldenleaves rattle past,ushered like so many children of the wind,and the wind has left them dry and brown likemilk-tea. he drinks to warm his hands and belly,lemonade glasses in the glass door armoire.when he stands, his bones creak like branches dried by the wind,grey and peeling, potpourri of autumnal whim;when his wife comes home, she will collect the scraps of barkand rub them with rose oil or maybe tangerine and leave themin the parlor, beside the glass door armoire.in the evening,the sky has forgotten its stars but a few peek throughsuburban haze. he lived in the country, once, and he told mehe wouldn't have left
acridi.a dead bird rots,stomach heat-split and picked on,feathers stuck to the concretewhen he peels it up.ii.he pours kerosene,holding one shaking match lit—fat melts, entrails crisp,marrow dries and bones crack,ashes rise against the wind,falling on gray buildings.iii.in his midmorning dream,the phoenix soars.
daliin that second,(when the sun beat so hard i could hearevery waving particle, see the color before it wasswallowed; i closed my eyes and felt the concreteblaring, the refracting windows aching, and eachbird crackling in the parched trees, feathers rustlingand beaks clacking, blackness bleached orange andmy hands sought in the silence of my pockets, imprisoned and pallid like a dog yapping in that hot car)i became.
stillyou lust to make his long legs quiverlike two blades of grass heavy with morning dewbut you're the first frost of november.
terminali.we landed in oklahomaand drank cheap martinis in the terminal;you carried my guitar and fell in lovewith my voice but not my tongue,not my hands.ii.there's a man with a garagethat looks like a plane because nothingmeant more to him. will you make a modelof that bar? will you make a modelof my red cheeks? or will you live in a townhomewith her and three children?iii.the problem was you're not gay.the problem was there was feelingbut it wasn't for us. i had you butit wasn't for us.iv.i'm not sure if i resent you,but i remember that bar and every pockmarkon the stool you sat on while i playedthe song that parted yo
Cupping RiceShe collects the rice after weddings Looking for prophecies in her cupped palmsSearching each grain for a story.She thinks of the children they ought to haveAnd their names with deeper meanings:Against birth, defender of man.A blonde girlAnd a precocious boyWho she knows will one day learnThe language of suicideTheir starfish handsNever to be the pickers of rice
summergirlNow read aloud over here. Do give it a listen, won't you? i. summergirl,you are crowthroated and tumblingthrough the aspen grovehair on fire with sunrise, lungsfull of sky.eyelashes like wildflowersand every morning bringsa new spray of frecklesand a sharper curve to your collarbones.the cornfields hold no shadowsfor your lighthouse eyesand there are no endings in thatsurefooted smile. ii. you have grownso fast.autumn finds you with broken anklesleaning on an oak branchand watching the skies.crow to sparrow--you are quiet.summergirl, there is peace in silence,perched treetop,fallen antlers in your hands.you will come to mourn your deer.keep them close. iii. by winter you have paled,and like the streams your eyes have frosted over.you feel the chill--there is no need for sight.summergirl, th
New FaithOf course it would be foolish to assume that the relationship between us is linear:I touch your skin.Memories re-alignto meet the meaning in your eyes.Of course it would be foolish to resume the old ways of believing:There is no painthat this moment cannot bend into beauty.
Satelliteit seems you wander aimlessly—like the white blinking light between the branches of that dark tree i see when i open the backdoor to smokeanother desperate cigarette—orbiting so far in the distance thati cannot fathom your purpose,though you must serve one in the livesof many.
Stepping StonesI rip pagesout of poetry books,the titles ofShakespeareand Plathand Dickinsonlittering the floorlike trash,and I wonderif we don't allwind up stepping stonesin the end.
New Year's DayThe first winter was composed of sleeping,flower-like, but this second is like prowlingthe gap between feeling and thinking; limbering up the dawn, unscarfed, uncoated, with my head like a getaway bag, hastily packed, a floppy trammel of tossed lists: lists of liestold and believed that have sinceturned into calcitrate in unsunned cloisters,and I should know the dawn because I've seen it,and I should know the gap because I populated itwith crows and left-behind items of clothing.It was like dismantling a spiral staircasestep by step, leaving a sequence of hollowsstripped of the season's riverly cadence.So I have my
PositiveLeft to me, your worst historian, to pick up, in a daze, some depth of diction I never found while you had livedand I can only now pretend that words are capsulesof sanguinity, that they’ll unmask the symbologies of sound that bore your binaries to their realms like sacred dreams of Hypnos. Regret’s a simple word.I always thought of "A Separate Peace", and in those scenesyou were this Mozart in the rough, a perfect chord, one which I would meekly channel through cracks of light shown through the fist of my own interference,steady indifference.
PixieI never had enough faith in you,my best postmodern pixie friend,who presses herself against my shoulderkilling her fall with leaning.You taught me something newabout anxiety today: how to wakeup when it's morning, how to miss dactylic illness with the parched indelicacy of a crinkled sun. In the eternal rendition you sayyour name is always in the vocative case, and only vocative:says the girlwho taught a smaller girl to sing,a girl of thirteen, with the samenimble character we shared, the samecalderical eyes we shared. The girl's voice tumb
there's a corpse in the atticthe first colony was pinkwith orange crust,gleaming [slotted sunlightwith dust motes]utopiaslick with last month's lunch.
dandelion winethe dandelion has made its appealto wine and whimsy,but it's plucked regardless of nostalgia.[i am that lion's ragged blooms, and you are the strong winds that blow my meek seeds away, and he he is the brawny child pulling me like another weed passe. and there have been other gardeners with hands mortared in black veins by fertile soil, savaging between tame dalmatian tulips and mums the color of fat tabbies embellished by aureate mornings; there have always been these potted plants prettily set as if all of creation planned them so.]and its roots remain tuckedIn the good earth,flirting with raindrops and shelved rever
halloween isn't here yetyou, my dear, have a thick middleand gorgeous legs: thighs dustedgolden by hairs sparse, and calvesangular with a coarser gilding, tapering to a weighted ankle andelegant feet complemented with anarch carved by an artist of no lessmerit than michelangelo; the ladiesmay have whispered of his crafting, but you were the name on their loudestbreaths: do you know how often i havethanked god or coincidence that i cancount the virtues in your broad shoulders,tucked in moral meat and marrow?and how often i have loved your eyes,the color of noon sky not quite clearbut not cloudy, either? [please recall those autumn su
october tenthsummarily, i felt many things that did not amount to much, but that is not to belittle the conclusion: i noticed october had lent its grandfather cologne to the air, that the musk rested in my clothing but did not remain, and that the words but not the tune to hallelujah were caught in my teeth. beside them, pieces of lunch rotted, to be picked out when self-consciousness set, and beside them, my tongue became more familiar with the holes in my lip. i felt wise to have not imbedded ink in my skin but stupider when my opalescent reflection, shifting in a puddle of oil, reminded me of the holes in my lip and that their tangibility denoted visib
novemberthe sun is a dim pearl beneath a blanket of grayhung low from the heavens;i'm your yellow tremorpaled by the cold, achingfor a proper sunrise.