We’d sprayed gold paint into paper bags and huffed the fumes. Detached from body, self a phosphorescent bubble ahover in some bright-colored world, somewhere askance from here. My boyfriend passed out. Sometimes, when one says love, she means A sour drink that tastes better than loneliness or the door that leads out … Continue reading
While parked outside a liquor store along the highway winding through the Canadian Rockies. We’d stopped to pick out a bottle of wine, anticipating romance in the hotel that night. But the liquor store was closed, and I’d locked the keys in the truck, my wallet on the seat beside your purse and phone. … Continue reading
to her high school years and envies her blindness, her unclosing to everything, no hopes, no dreams, but like a dog, now now now and she could say she wasted those days, but she knows she could use some of that now –and in her college years, closing in, choosing this and that, getting opinions, … Continue reading
in the midst of a euphoric head massage I’m haunted by a vision of you; colours and patterns and lines that don’t connect, a plait of hair hanging over a shoulder as you stand underneath a bottle-brush in the garden of our apartment on the highway I can see a brass door handle and … Continue reading
When I reinvented cryptography you scorned my mastery of acute and oblique symbols. When I discovered that supposedly inert gases panted like dogs you disdained my litter of lab reports. When I chaired the Bank of America you closed your account. When I posed for a statue of Richard Nixon you laughed so loudly the … Continue reading
Tattered like a Clyfford Still painting, my birthday unfolds on a snowdrift and settles there. I could use a glass of wine the color of starlight, but the murmur of competing voices keeps me sober. Maybe later in front of the TV I’ll cough up the stone in my throat. Maybe when I’m old and … Continue reading
We hear ourselves speak as though it is we who are driving this mad bus pell-mell down the mountain. Outside, under the juniper tree, the wasps are swarming, the bullfrogs relentless and brackish in their chant. Pain or pleasure, medicine or poison, each blade of grass can be a gate, each footfall a moment of wakefulness. … Continue reading
Coming toward you on the sidewalk, a young woman herds two little girls— pink coats, matching hats with pom-poms that twirl on long tethers and you smile. They’re out of a portrait you’ve seen somewhere—hanging in a museum, or glossy in a magazine or living in a book, where their hair is the richest … Continue reading
Here is the end of the line where our buildings all rise, cornered in mad and gray pragmatism. With Soviet cloud cover and concrete coats, cucumber crowds creep in little markets picked on by auto fumes. Hidden, high windows frame frail bones — Mother’s old eyes rubbing cats and rugs in cataract. Through black … Continue reading
Hardly poetry. I like mine bland, burned, & free from eccentricities. Just a slab of charred meat on toughened bun. What I’m used to: protest verse for my intestines, thin mat on a steel slab. He goes burger also, prefers juicy, adding leafy accoutrements on top. I like the thought of a world … Continue reading
Coe Review 