Christopher Smart knelt on these floors. He praised winter, he wrote Geoffrey on the walls. He shouted   I’m barefoot. I lost my rosary.   Praying in Bedlam used…

  In Mr. Rodriguez’ high school World History class, a lecture about the crushing stress on ordinary citizens—through poor harvests, through taxes on the very salt and wheat needed for…

  We weren’t anywhere we weren’t nearby When she gave a shriek My friend had taken a bullet And was now walking the bullet around in his back   He’d…

  He will be a beggar–– no, a barber!   And he will polish your nails each time you lay down your pen   even though hair is his only…

  I love these new super bookstores! Right here on upper Broadway— a standing invitation to a private stately home stocked with milling lounging browsing guests sipping demitasse or eating,…

  I fell for your strange lace of unstressed x’s, the beautiful a bb a cc patterns, mysterious codes I didn’t grasp but simply liked the look of. The primitive…

  Bless the amber porch light that coronets his flimsy helmet’s sheen and the ringlets this dusk breeze bounces on elastic straps thin as earthworms baked black atop the stoop.…

  I wait for you there, pushing the baby in his stroller. The baby claps with concentration and delight. A tiny, black-haired woman’s cheek bleeds as I walk from Emergency…

  Feeling like the neighborhood cat who fell through the screen of my open skylight, curiosity in this case leading, not to death, but limbo—stuck in an empty house until…

  starts skygreen as a glow in the chest cracks like a tree branch, her lips a deluge of lost notes, plastic fossils a lone mop tumbling down the street…

  Yeah, you are obsessed: with your yellowish skin, you are forever lost in your meditation within the shape of a wishbone, inside the broken wing of an oriental bird…

  But I am not here to fall asleep, to keep sleeping—I open the window, take issue with the black slag, the burning, blazing city I rummage through to find…