Once upon a time I sat in summer chairs beside cool vine walls. This was in a borough east of the major city, where families gathered in seasonal joy, by blooms fragrant, to worship the summer and its might. There is nothing diminutive about the world when one is…

Wind was a sorry excuse for force

On the phone I asked my mother how she was doing. “I’m getting old,” she said. “Going slow. But getting there. I’m ninety-four!” My mother was always 94, when she was really 93. I remember she was 93 right after she turned 92. And 92

Lights of human occupation burn/ in patterns like the growth/ of a bacillus, lethal and prodigious,

It gets eaten.

Mayumi flicked her hand, making her circle deflect the spell. She picked up speed and her hand grabbed Emi.

It was R who embodied love for me. We’d eaten gummi worms in the park, held them up to the sun, yellow and green and translucent. When we returned to her flat, they were everywhere. I’d never seen such a thing. They hung in the air, these gummi worms.

Wild bore the wind down on me, coming out of the heavens that turned around the stars of the evening. The longing and the appetite at work in the body, all tickling to open a girl’s mane, gaping, health-giving crossroads to the body. Hail and farewell t

I am experience and information// at a small but irredeemable remove.

A sizzling as skin and sinew melt, fall away. "Scream if you need to scream, child." And I scream, and her song gains strength. The warmth of her around me. It is time.

I don't look like other poets. / People hardly believe it when I say / "I write poetry, sometimes. / During lonely evenings."

She’d picked him up at a party freshman year, calling him Danny. Until then he had always been Daniel. He’d said nothing and his name was changed.

Although it was unlikely that she would witness mobsters racing up or down Wabash Avenue with guns ablast, she paced behind the hotel's ground-floor glass eyeing traffic for fifteen or twenty minutes . . .

Fragment’s of ignorance strewn by a haphazard hand

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