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The Maximum Security Book Group

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"So what about this week's selection?" I ask cheerfully. "What did everybody think?" "I liked it!" says Liz. She always does--her tastes aren't very discriminating.

Now Fox News is saying

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We were in love with the same disease.

World

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Making me hate language

only, remember me

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I know how deeply your hands plunged into my fire. I remember putting my arms around your back and holding you in the flames for as long as I could bear it. And I remember feeling you slip away, serenely, with that light that urges the rose up out of my s

In the Woods II

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The neighbor was a little woman...

Flesh Alive

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Rise up, carcass—march! / Naught is new beneath the jaundiced sun: / last of the last of Louis' gold, / light is sliced through clean / beneath flecks and films of time.

An after-image, a ghost

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It was also witnessing the emergence into explicitness and clarity of everyone's expendability.

Favorite Child

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It was in the early sixties when my mother discovered she was my father’s second wife. Four years before, they were married quickly, by a justice of the peace, because his transfer to the States had come through. He’d charmed her with his dark chocolate e

Among the Young Aesthetes

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I found him on the internet the other day, His air laconic, the beard now ashen grey.

Hey, Orpheus, Don't Look Back, Dude

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Graduates, I've seen the future of this world and it has had part of its brain removed.

This is the Best Poem You'll Ever Read

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This is the best excerpt you'll ever read.

among American gods

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in dark recesses of this morgue of earth / where beauty of the good does not compel, / where evil's horrors seldom do repel— / Americ gods reign o'er from birth to birth.

The Third Time my Father Tried to Kill Me

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They sang and clapped and stomped shod feet on hardwood floor, the smell of man sweat and bomb-making thick as perfume.

My Grief, All Mine

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Your brain was connected to your feet ...

Trapping for Poetesses

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So many traps for catching female poets have been invented that it is a rare editor who ever really sees one. H.L. Mencken

A Tender Button

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He looked at a man in a straw hat on YouTube and thought “that could've been me, if I'd learned to play the guitar.” He savored the wistfulness of the moment. The pluperfect always made him sad. But the conditional was almost too much to bear. Octopi were a…

Right Now You're Being So Sloshed{revisited}

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amongst the other gentlygathering flotsam up against my internal dictionary's borders. Doesn't matter much if the deed is life rushing itself through a tube that poured us out together like this, or just mutual need that…

More Bands Than You Can Shake a Stick At

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Bands: Free Blankie My First Dustbuster Sledge Hammer Glove Compartment Hot Weather Lady Cattle Prod and the Punks The Cowpokes Poker Two Fingers In Occupy This Tidy Up Goal Keeper and The Kneecaps Leslie Sweet And The Kitchen

Let it Rage Until

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Let it rage. I shall not suppress you. Let your rage speak to you of the sorrow it hides, until your sadness swallows you whole.

Let's Start with the End

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Let’s start with the end—death. Upbeat, huh?

Blue/rings 7

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Blue Rings/Blurring

'How I Came To Find Out I'm Like Thomas Pynchon and Bruce Sterling' by ... yours TRULY!!! The third born of three. Or four. Or

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yup.

The Sea at Sea (or Why is There a Question Instead of Not a Question)

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"This above photo by goerte' shows the natural state of a bourgeois subject' - Friedrich Nietzsche "the naked image is more fat then the never naked word, because a pig is an interpretation of a mind, also hog are more green when they worship rationality, because…

An Exhibit of Nature

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Me undressing at the side of the road, broken like an unstrung Sappho, blood lust going full force. Sexual organs like living rooms, exposed before God and everyone. Lights came on across the reservoir, and I was down on all fours in the cinders and dust,

Our Notorious Youth

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Our flesh was on fire like a flute with wind, or a little reed next to the dried river. I was like a voyeur whose heart was a sponge, brushing up against all that disturbed man. I was only and ever the flower of our notorious youth, aware of more than the

The Mid-Life Suburban Strip-Tease Crisis

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Once we’d mellowed from the wine, our little group of friends grew reflective. We started talking about our “bucket lists”–how we were going to spend the remainder of our years before we lapsed into senility.

The Mutes

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She was deaf, but he was not; they both could sign.

walks from to walks to

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hands slide into gloves unseen / eyes disappear behind glass / the crank turns the flywheel spins: / every octave has droppt low / sub-sonic shudders within—

The Longing

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It’s the longing from another life inside that pulls me along by the fine hairs below my navel, exposed at the midriff, and by the short fine hair at my neck, also the dense bunch between my legs, as you might imagine. And it’s the longing of the love I

Prayers and Plastic Wrap

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The effort involved in making my chocolate chip cookies, do you know? They're not easy. No. Not easy.