1635 13 8
|
A lifeboat came by in the night,
And I finally saw we were sinking.
|
163582
|
It was so hot we walked out on our husbands. There were reasons, we supposed. They left the refrigerator doors open all day, grabbing beers when they passed by, tossing the sticky caps upon counters. They drove their Metropolitans to buy food, leaving th
|
16351514
|
I wrote this during a poetry workshop at the Atlantic Center for the Arts with Carolyn Forché. January, 2015. So much more has happened since that stunning week.
|
16351816
|
I keep encouraging him to write stories not poems, but I think he enjoys writing things that don’t fit together. Things that stumble.
|
163432
|
He arrives at the appointed hour, driving up the dusty road in his '68 Ford truck. On the side is stenciled “Sampson's Farrier Service.” He parks in front of the barn. Patience watches from the front porch, where she has just set down a…
|
163455
|
While the other kids blew bubbles, Maddy clung to my neck. She didn't cry or scream, and she held on loosely, not with the death grip some kids have. For five Wednesday afternoons, Maddy wrapped her pudgy arms over my shoulders and rested her bottom on m
|
1634106
|
In the small hours, when the crackling of the embers had stopped and the room had gone cold, the boiler kicked in and the pipes began to clang. He was half-roused out of his sleep, and then slipped under again to dream of Marley's fettered ghost.
|
1634119
|
Your precious feet were there once, pressed against the familiar floorboards, where your poems suddenly appeared to you, flashing like lightning. I wonder which window they came in? Here's a thought: you were like that window. You caught…
|
163433
|
I know I’m slipping
into my mother’s skin. I answer the phone
with her voice; her hands grind the coffee beans.
And who is this listening to NPR in the morning
while the fresh-faced girls in the neighborhood trudge toward school,,
peonies han
|
163463
|
You took up residence on the dark side of things, a bolthole in a wind-flayed right angle of a tower block where pigeons and suicides tumbled blackly on the air currents. You set about drifting off from who you were on a tide of cheap whisky and bad poetry, graduating…
|
163475
|
Traveling in half-lit fluorescence, she smiles up at me, pale and strained
|
163444
|
The litany of tough decisions scrawled on. Stencil Gucci on no-name jeans. Buy cheap chocolate and scrape the name off. I looked over and watching the saliva encrusting in the corner of Larry’s mouth, my heart sank.
|
163464
|
He had stared at the back of his neck for so long that images of his nape flashed into view randomly throughout the day like interfering signals from a station just out of reach, DESIRE CHANNEL, or something, reminding him of his skewed priorities, his fa
|
163474
|
They had been wintering on the Cape under gunmetal skies...
|
16342011
|
We invent our beauties//
as we find them and engineer/
our horrors
|
163300
|
“It's going to be hitting around the mid-90's tomorrow” said the television expert. “So what? Like 1995?” “Maybe, perhaps even '96” “Does this mean I should break out my Backstreet Boys record?” …
|
1633137
|
Here’s how you do it. First you get a ladder, a long one.
|
16331411
|
|
163354
|
Beneath the crosshatch gazes of the satellites and above the maze of sound, seahorse clouds exhale a glaucoma haze before they are absorbed into surveillance footage
|
163386
|
“No,” he says. A simple lie. “I -” He pushes the sleeping bag off of his legs. Their getaway reset was a mistake.
|
163300
|
Frey wanted to see heaven without having to die. He had returned from the sea after being gone for three weeks, ranting wildly about a giant ship he had seen in the distance one afternoon.
|
1633138
|
When you bring information, it does not arrive.
|
16332816
|
Lately he's been wanting to write about love...
|
163300
|
Gone Heather,
with her hands in her hair,
silent for help,
over-involved now scared.
|
163288
|
and I can't help it if it is. I know it won't stay that way for long, but for now that's all I've got to work with, shining in my window, made of all eight fingers and a couple of thumbs. But the latest pushy words still want to give…
|
163233
|
In a corner of a neighbor’s land too stony to till Cob makes a mystery.
|
163274
|
The investigator starts by accumulating facts, as many facts as he can. He sifts through them with meticulous precision, leaving no leaf unturned, no page unread.
|
163243
|
When I was a kid, I was terrified of dying in a bombing,
which is strange, really, because I lived in Long Island,
which has relatively few bombings to speak of.
|
1632139
|
|
163211
|
The closed door swallowed up both voices, and all I could make out afterward were muffled pleas and angry answers that died completely.
|
