I’d driven fifteen hours, things broken back there   or refusing to break—not the things with which I’d stocked the converted carport where I fried rice & cooked coffee,    no—things: Love, Work, Money, Innocence (that stubborn  fucker most of all). I was home again, nowhere to stay,  mother dead, father somewhere, brother north, sister … Continue reading →

I am writing to you in the moments you’re missing Wondering if I miss you   You’ve been absent since I was young – The difference now is permanence   I wonder if you knew What you were becoming If you were as scared as I am Of becoming you   Everytime my lips touch … Continue reading →

Hiding a body is easy.    First—silence the still-small voice  with the butt of your cigarette.   Tuck the teeth into a cellophane sack. Invert the remainder into a lucky charm  in the pack of 19 numbly remembered moments.    You will let them bum it off you, give it away,   eat your heart out.  … Continue reading →

It happens so quickly, the men smoking in the tea shop have only moments to stub out their Turkish cigarettes.   A mother squeezes her fussing son  against her breast, his whimpering inaudible  beneath the bombs’ sizzle and thud.   Tracers thread the slightly cloudy sky as scooters and sputtering trucks speed south.  Rise Up! … Continue reading →

Lately, they have been crawling into my brain. They burrow deeply into its warm moist rot.   What does it feel like, the doctors ask? Well, like someone whispering a secret   in a language I don’t understand, or like wind at the end of the pier on a cold March morning.   Sometimes, I … Continue reading →

Tiny figures in a landscape: the world rendered in code.   A broken vessel: a stupid- looking shepherd fingering   a potsherd. My family crest: three golden storks hanging    by the neck on a background of burgundy. Eros shot   with his own errant arrow.  The Madonna asleep   in a vestibule; Christ crawling … Continue reading →

Cat’s silken gears propel shoulders, hips as smooth as oil; his velvet fur rip- ples, across his body as he slips into the laps of singing girls who kiss his mouth.  He purrs against their petal lips. Continue reading →

over the coast road cranes turn slowly, mechanical as the legs of wasps. once in canada one of them got in through an open window; landed right  in my wineglass.    I fished her out and put her on the table, then got up and grabbed another glass to place on top. she lay on … Continue reading →

The slouch man waits, smoke fat and crackle heavy, verged electric, always jangling.  He appears anywhere  waddle belly into bursting,  forcing fight in what his gut spills.    A man for the ages, roiling beneath his sweat crust shell, always scratching that part,  boil prober, itch tender,  thinking he’s the wounded one.    Some seek … Continue reading →

These are the miniature pillars of frost  that rise in clumps like glacial cities from the frozen soil in late autumn, delicate strands blossoming singly or in sheaves, fragile and temporary. Coming across a patch walking to school,  you’d marvel at their beauty, glittering in the morning sun with impossible intricacy, and respond in that … Continue reading →