Self-portrait

poetry
  Let the wind whip a canvas with coffee grounds and leaves, the easel upright on a porch with boards missing like molars. Give the wind time and pigment: the…

Hallucination

poetry
  Another haunting symptom her late Dementia Won’t let me forget. I mean that night I found her Sitting straight up in bed. All glassy-eyed: “Look at him. Oh look…

Head to expose

poetry
  only after a thorough comparison                   of clutch and diet,              with meager fruit and seed                  regimens avoided                                 (before I attempt a change of nest)                                       …

Stranded on Old US 1, Appling, Georgia

poetry
  Steam rose from the old black Ford. You could see where the engine block had cracked, but not where the auto industry hit the wall-- goodbye DeSoto, goodbye Edsel--…

Emendation

poetry
  I don’t have to go back to my childhood, there’s nothing there I still want: but of miracles left to me, I’d like to restore a look I once…

Siren

poetry
              … for we know everything that the Argives and Trojans           did and suffered in wide Troy through the gods’ despite.                     Odyssey XII, 189-90 (trans. Lattimore)     Look.…

In the Walk-in

poetry
  You come from behind— press me up against industrial shelves fingers tacky with sugar my arms full thick bricks of butter tumble when you kiss my neck I tug…

Playing Dead

poetry
             for my son Graham   The room shatters with giggles before your hand’s thin worms burrow my ears. When that fails they hook inside my cheeks and nose.…

Postmortem

poetry
  In 1793, during the French Revolution,          Charlotte Corday was executed by guillotine for the assassination          of Jean-Paul Marat. After her head fell into the basket with a sickening          thump,…

Meditation

poetry
            after Baudelaire   Settle down now, sadness. It’s time for bed. You asked for evening. Well, here it is. A fine mist covers the city like dread. It…

Cinder

poetry
  This is a story of fire, ash, and a child falling into a blaze where she singed her side. This is the child, now thirty, now a woman looking…

Tigger

poetry
  The nurses named the machine that breathed for my brother. Tigger had a serial number, but no one used it. When doctors stopped in they would ask how Luke…