Poetry

In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times. —Bertolt Brecht There will be prayer, too, but to a different god, and dread will lurk in the songs we sing. Doom in the timpani no matter what the tune...

We went forth in pairs, born of women. We believed in a god, or didn’t. We worshipped numbers, their primal power to confer our place on the planet, the size of our intellect, the degree of coolness or warmth in the air. Air was everywhere...

will take a while, doodle all you want. Dot a pupil on each pearl stacked to distraction on the margin. Argus froth out a hundred eyes of which by turn did sleep always a couple and the rest… Scribble the obvious. Life, friends, is… I cross-hatch...

Around a hairpin turn, not quite hidden inside a forest that has been trampled for tourism, strip malls disguised as native villages, façades of man-made wood, green confetti like grass littering the parking lot, wind catchers and arrows, tiny...

“ . ..and when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him.” –Genesis 4:8 Not the exile, nor the ceaseless toil, nor the pain of childbirth or the shame of nakedness; not the withering of blossoms, or the slow...

And then the nature of the person To lift the cloud Criminal in nature Turning Grandfather clock A whole lot of personal pain Lifting the cloud Being somebody who loves this country These were lies The nature of its work As a cloud Grandfather clock...

In my country, number one for billionaires, prisoners, franchises offer menu consistency. What lies dormant today in the collective unconscious? Akin to tintype, sun prints itself on structures and skin. As we age our vocabularies expand with names...

Maybe inject chlorophyll beneath skin to grow own food as we go. Maybe clutch in each palm handfuls of fat as hedge against vanishing animals. Maybe class up cursing with smattering of Latin. Maybe drive to supermarket stunned by afternoon sun faint...

Because we cannot believe in God the Monster entirely but believe in God the Monster a little, we’ll never be elected. We own these souls. Won’t someone fix them, uncover and preserve forever patches of sidewalk sun to sit in? In this game we walk...

After latest tragedy, let’s drift asleep listing words for what fish oblivious in waters do: plunge, glide, dive, sway. Our daily allowance of banalities includes again that strange phrase, “realistic fiction.” Among many nevers: Billionaire or...

Translucent amphibian or molecular invertebrate, scavenging rodent or stubborn ungulate, whatever it is endures all manner of onslaught for that imaginable unimaginable forthcoming moment it’s the last thing blinking and breathing in landscape...

Carving out the walls of Zion A desert river called The Virgin Urged us to sit that night. You know. The night my head caught fire And the stars kept falling And the splash of moon on the water made it certain That earth and sky go on and on and on...

At the salty rim we long for raindrops, umbrella-shaped dancing on a picnic plate, settling down the dust in their hurry to spill old water into rusty tanks, surprising clover from ceded ground. The same precious well will mount on the same well...

I have heard a cicada crawled out of the dark silences of the mountain after years eating its heart out, to join its luck its wet green wings clicking to the mountain choir dewdrop blackbird twig-snap stone-throw and the wind playing on things...

New white folks
in the neighborhood
don’t know to greet
a stranger on the street.
They don’t mean
to be rude.
How long will it last, then –
How ya doing?
Eye to open eye.

(@ the 217 Congressional Representatives who voted to “repeal & replace” the ACA, each one up for reelection in 18 months) You will someday sicken and someday, sure as taxes, vote no more. You will someday sicken and someday, sure as taxes, vote...

And it’s not one of these old-age lapses caused by blinking brain synapses. And it’s not a matter of speechless awe at something I just saw on YouTube—a toilet-flushing cat, or commensurately gifted brat. Sometimes, it’s true, I lose a noun or two...

Summer halfway trundled up, the July rain rasps down our nighttime roof and window glass, the road out front rivering to ruts of pebbled sand, where soil bleeds veins between clumps of grass. At dawn the cat stands stunned at doorway’s edge, tail...

  I have never had a mother, or, no longer have or, once did, briefly, for a day or two. Perhaps she was only mine   during the wet crown of hours I spun my skull through her ripe & widening cunt, then fastened to her nipple—   a...

I did it alone. Not in bed where I’d willed myself dead for so many years I became apparition not in the bathroom where I fed my body to a hungry blade & cut down my hair with a match. It was not in the arms of the man I tried over & over to...

  You spoiled mound complicated by static you skull-born satellite launched from a splintered mirror you doom-hatched agony steady as piss you childless guilt scorched in fog you blazing delirium un-teaching my name you sideshow daydreamer...

Heels in stirrups, knees pitched above my hips, I am blinded by every measured breath required before each push— a cold, unnatural discipline. I was taught to focus on something in the room, to distract from the hell-rigged pain knifing me from the...

you write poems to understand what you cannot understand. name the beast you’ve been trying to outrun your entire life. you’re forty & it’s time to stop avoiding. halt the fogged spin of language that redirects the eye. say what you mean...

For as far as we can see, they trudge across swirling sand toward us At the gate, one child’s blinks, such a uniform degree of metronomic motion with inky lashes—they seem to make an audible click, the second hand of memory, calligraphic Tropics of...

Schoolchildren wait in seven, six, five, four straight lines that sway and shimmer as they’re led away until a winged V arrows south, and they see the pointed shape of flight from home, an escape— though they read liberty in motion, not need for...

  I always wanted to be that woman That brazen hussy clothed in red The color of a torch singer’s lips or a rooster’s wattle Fecund, inflamed, unashamed My trembling limbs spread wide In rampant, ecstatic bloom Defying you and your mortal fears...

Stant pavidae in muris matres oculisque sequuntur Pulveream nubem et fulgentes aere catervas. -AENEID VIII 590-1 The fearful mothers standing on the wall, the cloud of dust they follow with their eyes: millennia pass, and nothing’s changed at all of...

Where do you put the anger and the fear? Hand them over. Here. What do you do with the uncertainty? Pass it to me. The sadness, the foreboding, all the rest? I bare my breast. The blustering threats, the dark and stormy skies? Look into my eyes...

I was aping Mussolini in a pizzeria when the American I fell for called me an asshole, not an overreaction in Roma, the city responsible for romantics like Caligula and Berlusconi. Later that night, soccer hooligans attacked the riot cops, the...

Featured Portfolio: “American Patriot” as a Dialogue between Poetry and Photography about the Nature of Patriotism, an Interview Pittsburgh-based photographer Charlee Brodsky spent this last election year taking photographs of American flags in...

yu so fun so danger so smoke so ready 2 deady [next stop: F I R E W O R K S spend $ & get &z off] we bubble buy blame bead up the sky w blood [the libertree thirsty & i wonder what this b 2 me] as yr local majikal hapahaole mite say a...

–Hospital de los Venerables, Sevilla She stares with a bearing – experience having brought her soul this far – and lifts a frond, one kind of sword, in one hand, effortless. In the other, clutched to her, the silver plated sword of her own...

The woman on the waste site tour bus wore the kind of bonnet my grandmother kept in her purse for emergencies. She squared her shoulders in front of us, the plastic kerchief knotted to her head and not a cloud in the sky. Our guide in charge of...

buff buffe / buffer buff/reibu / buffrebufffring / & fervently awaitin ya pass       code o, word      ? we wonder how we will in2       existence: amazonial primal access & 1070p rejection      o’ taxes science will save ya ass / a seat...

The entire planet is his. Put here: a statistic about how long we have. The (partially) fake news: the Garden, created for man, is now available for pillage. Man’s ingenuity to fix it, ha. Why don’t they talk about man’s stupidity...

Don’t get off the bus Take it nice & take it slow No one getting on the bus & nowhere else to go Sometimes the bus stops moving Sometimes it moves ahead Little on by little off There’s little to be said The bus itself’s the...

—as noted on the Poetry Foundation website This poem isn’t meant for you or for anyone, really— hairpin scratches in wet clay, hardly cuneiform, whatever came to mind then left as quickly. Resistant, like a child whose fist clamps around a...

Long after nights of arm-tickling across the chasm between our twin beds, after all the shared illnesses of childhood—spiking fevers doused in crystalline alcohol, such pungent, icy baptisms, after the honeyed scabs of measles and of falls, years of...

My Midwest is two old women: The first, a neighbor, who watched the delivery man lug the huge spring water jug, slung on his back like firewood, to my door. Bulbous glass, as slippery as our icy back steps, but foreign, exotic to her, with a name...

Barbecue smell drifts over from the river. Too much lighter fluid splashed in the pouring. Flares of sudden fire. Parkland. Given: a family, Dad home on leave. The kids lead him by the hand, showing him off, he’s theirs. And Mom fully reclined on...

“The bay is blowing gray beneath the sky. The trash fish are fingered From the net and go missing with a flick of the blade. Pity the newborn’s cry into the cold of the clinic. Fear the man whistling along the road beneath a dying sky. Know the last...

The lizard was green against the wooden reaper. It has come close to this happening many times, but this time The red heart is beating on a stick. You were eyeing the furs in the windows midtown. Teeth get lost in the dark. Your tongue is winding...

The red flyer was posted by the elevator On the ground floor by the mailboxes. Management Has enlisted the utility company To come install new more efficient shower heads, Low-flow kitchen faucet aerators and other Improvements that will save money...

“Reality,” said my friend Fortunato, a neuroscientist, “is a controlled hallucination.” Just so, the unnamable swims into focus, all teeth and sharp corners.                         A guy at my daughter’s fancy school complains about belt-tightening...

                                        “Knowing I couldn’t sleep made it harder to try.”                                                                   –Marvin Bell Eulene tries anyway, even though insomnia gallops like...

of Telemachus dreaming, not of Odysseus, of a man whose name is not                                         Odysseus: this man’s one name’s not not Odysseus, either, nor man whose name is not Odysseus. Odysseus is not the dreamed-up man whose name...

After the election, I stare at a door. What’s behind it? Scylla? Charybdis? Maybe a tiger. Or else, a tiger. After the election, witch hazel, stubborn, electric, bursts yellow over Wolf Creek. I’m too sad to get drunk. Gold needles tumble all day...