1477 11 9
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A cheap pocket knife was the only sharp I carried in my backpack and they allowed me that. The man with the pot tattoo on his neck said, “All of us here needs some type of knife. You gotta cut up your food. We don't…
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147787
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He disrobes; shoes, socks,
shirt, belt, pants. He smells of hard work.
The nude whisper of everything else.
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147799
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Its odors of quicklime/
and pyre-smoke will curl/
commingled in acrid air.
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147700
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My eyes don’t close but hers are shut tight, and something inside tells me that to this girl, I could be absolutely anyone.
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147751
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It’s as she reaches into the fridge for the carton of half-and-half with the grainy waxy photo of the little girl—Last Seen 10/2/06—that the memory surfaces:
“Hey. That’s mine.”
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14761011
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I fall in love with a second cousin at the picnic. I make sure I sit next to her.
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147621
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147631
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In the fall it is especially beautiful with the blazing orange oaks set on fire against a crystal blue sky. It is here that she frequently daydreams of her demise.
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147631
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I will show you how, in the spring,
the sidewalks here
look like a crossword puzzle resting under
a glass of lemonade,
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147652
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Method of divination. Open a book to any section. Drop your hand onto the page. Read that there is an exorcism happening in the other room.
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147622
|
Suddenly I'm not feeling it anymore. /
Poetry has become insufficient. /
I can't do it like I used to.
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147622
|
I do not know the species of birds here. /
The two I see playing on the balcony at night /
I can never call back.
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147611
|
She clutched her fat rolls and tugged on a pant leg. "I'm so embarrassed! You caught me on a bad day!"
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147611
|
. . . nor did mine eye apologize.
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147686
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I wrote her a poem.She said, “I hate poetry.” I said, “OK, just read the words then."
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147620
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Each had jostled and laboured for his or her place upon the blunt outcrop, in the cold persistent darkness, where the outcrop was merely something that had fallen and not quite been washed away.
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147521
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The Gropers of Prague were there, all around us, in spirit if not in fact. Was it KGB? Was it a ghost from my past? Or my own hand?
Stop guessing. It was Einstein himself. The KGB had taken him into custody somehow, though by what authority? All the
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147532
|
I used to be a poet, you know. /
Better, in many respects, than you.
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147543
|
They found your athymic neck/clipped like a bag of Skittles/and your lifeblood left a Rorschach test on the dash/in which they saw the future/and their own exits/(straight ahead and to the right).
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147533
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For me, it was that kind of moment. I got to come back. I had been here before and now, well now, I could come back. I had a chance to do it all again, bigger, better and well, just better. I hoped I could remember all that I learned the first time.
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147542
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The convalescent home's common areas are surprisingly well-appointed, given the neighborhood, which makes his actual living quarters that much more dismaying. Poorly lit, dusty, stifling, the room reeks of socks worn for weeks on end. My nostrils burn, and my eyes…
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147532
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Michiko stood in front of Steinway Hall on West 57th Street.
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14751610
|
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1475117
|
She had just done it in the backseat with the man she decided would be her father. Or maybe it was the cast of his eyes under the dim bar lights. Maybe she insisted that this had to be done, to relive the night under the stars, under a dented roof of a station…
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147543
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leaves, starlings and other words fall into thickets of orange or green grasses or tendrils or snakes
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147531
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Sweaty feet, drool from the weighty sleep of mid-afternoon naps, the inescapable perspiration of the South: all combine to create the entwined scent of socks and stale toothbrushes...
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147521
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“Apollo twenty-two. Come in.”, the voice crackled through the speakers of the aircraft. There was only silence broken by a solitary meow and the slight whistle of oxygenated air through the ventilation system. “Captain Snuggles, now that you…
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147544
|
James Hubert III sat at the bar. It was late. His wife and kids were long in bed and he knew he should be, too. But with the Lovelandtown lift bridge stuck in mid-air, a drink beckoned him. He sat next to Vince DeSantos, a small, stout man, with a bowling
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147555
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There’s someone in the audience who is immolating himself
Cutting his own leg over and over with a pen knife
And groaning: “Oh God, oh God”
And all I can think from up at the podium is
This guy must absolutely hate these poems
I am reading
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147561
|
She burps in beauty, like a frog
Who sits on lily pad so green,
Resounding nightly in his bog
But to my eyes unseen.
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