List Poem In Which There Is At Least One Lie
I’ve been trying for months to work moxibustion into a poem that isn’t about sex. According to personality tests I exhibit higher-than-average levels of aggression and I do not dispute these findings. The first time I saw my father slice the head off a bluegill I stared into the eye …
Read MoreLeftover Women
you’re gone & we’re still here firmly rooted to these scuffed floors these ancient rituals: we cord teeth & bitter lemongrass around our waists we wait in little rooms for someone …
Read MoreDeath of a Fox
I always knew it would end like this: a cold night, around the end of March, when I snowshoe out to a woodshed and reach for some last pieces of …
Read MoreFinally, After Years of Being Someone Else, I’ve Slowly Become
myself. And today, I keep meeting new selves— an improved fleet of ferries traveling the same waterways but glittering and dressed in this season’s traveling clothes. I’ve conjured my life with imaginative acts, in accidents of possibility. In the pleasure of a piece of music or through the shared midnight …
Read MoreI Tell Myself, You Should Write a Poem
about a plot line from your favorite soap, call it “Marlena, Possessed. Again.” You should write a poem about gas giants not as failed stars but successful planets. About what scientists call exotic physics—gamma rays coming from the Sun, not from its core but from protons slingshot through space by …
Read More[I was told the best rituals]
I was told the best rituals are cast by children inside covert forts, hedges carved out by older siblings or the wolf-man from a nightmare in the nineteenth century. In their spaghetti jars: ghosts, not June bugs or ladybirds or unreasonable expectations to be happy. Some children are not happy. …
Read MoreThe Breaking
We have drowned a father, sepsis and I. Deny someone water and the body will find disease to fill it with. ∴ It’s always the stomach, bulbous and huge. A cavern holding what would take cupped hands days to fill. …
Read MorePrayers to the Patron Saint of Lost Things with Mixed Results
When we lost the Z in our Scrabble set, we ruled any N could be turned on its side. This suddenly made possible blizzard, and buzzard. Someone played pizzazz. Soon, every lost thing began to appear. My mother used to tilt her head to the left to read emoticons then …
Read MoreThe First Poem I Write after My Father Dies
Because my father is dead in the darkness I hear birds. Not the willowy chirps of sparrows, not the clear insistence of cardinals. Instead, I hear him, some de-feathered pulp wailing under the rainy Connecticut skies, some scrap dragged splintery and gasping through its last night on earth. Tomorrow will …
Read MoreIdiom Idiot
Let’s mince words: growing up, idioms weren’t a piece of pie. I skated on thin eyes spitting phrases steel-tongued, checking squints for slip-ups, trying not to drop the doll in chats. Friends would ask me to spill the frijoles or take Angel’s chisme with a grain of salt and pepper, …
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