chrysalis first bite in an anorexic’s recovery   i’ve lost the iron sting of leaves once devoured— green bitterness a stain on the backs of my teeth.   “still hungry?” cicada chuffs from its split-shell pulpit. my half-open mouth, raw as nacre, tilts toward a...

terminal ii How quiet a mouse must be underfoot as it feeds on human destruction. This house changes with the seasons, its long steps shaped like a mailbox & languishes in the snowmelt, freezing and refreezing as the days grow longer and nights lengthen as a ruler...

The days are suddenly shorter; the scent of brisk air when I wake, inviting melancholy   tied to winter need. Instinct buried deep, that sunshine and sustenance will soon grow   scarce? But there’s comforting memory as well: heat from the fireplace blaze, a...

House and Universe   The single-story house’s flat roof would have been a wondersoaked site to lie and study clearsky starscape, but I remember flatness without below, without above. And I remember, rather than imagine, how bruiseblue regimen of the old, lost...

A group of college students takes a stroll the morning after September 11th   The stripling season’s light – timeless but tirelessly untrue. No matter – bright is that penultimate geometry felt round a sensible world, To which the goosefleshed credence of morning...

Postcards from the Knife-Thrower May 15 Vallejo, CA   Magdalena said, let’s forget we’re strangers Let’s talk about ragged breath gasps for air Let’s talk about binding hands Let’s talk about pleasure too deep to describe Let’s talk about exquisite freedom of...

Going Strong   At eighty-one and seventy-eight, Mom and Dad are still going strong. Halfway between twelve and thirteen, Chance, our Beagle, is still going strong. Civilization, at roughly seven-thousand years old, is still going strong. In my dreams an asteroid...

Thank you for laughing each time I aver, “Who is Samuel Pepys?” when the Jeopardy category pings “Diarists.” I thank grad school for resurfacings, the tedious pages worth a chilly May,   Hampton Court morning around the corner where some costumed King Henry...

Needles glittered on the streets in the soft Dutch dawn, like shards of broken glass catching the light. Children drifted in and out of narrow passageways, their movements sluggish as the canals, like something waiting to drown. Behind the street where Anne Frank’s...

Their fires have spread from sea to the mountains Circle the wagons, our herds have fled Night crackles like a fox Is that a carriage, a hotel, charged with what? The old country is filled with that morning light We look for in paintings with one old tree A clearing...

Then I did my impression of a drag queen impersonating Ed Sullivan singing T. Rex. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go over. What a lousy Thanksgiving. Everyone wanted to ‘do yoga.’ But asking Middle-Class white people to take up space seems redundant. Did I make it into the...

What nobody tells you about marriage is   It’s blackheads and popping pustules. It's watching someone get old in the shower. Its tweezers and hair in the drain and knowing where the scissors are. It's three hour long fights about what kind of litter to buy at the...

Slum Archangel   The velocity of her fall must have been excruciating / blackout-inducing. Tracing the arc of the angel’s nosedive: deadlift-dropped like Heaven metal and sparking all the way down, uranium-heavy, she would have cleaved the evening sky in two....