Category: Poetry

Riga Mountain trail,  our last hike before the blizzard. The hawk we spooked is perched across the pond— a scent of snow hangs heavy in the air. The rabbit’s eye is big and berry-bright, lucid as a black marble. He looks untouched except his skull— an open, red pomegranate. No clotting yet.

Looking down from my second story porch I see the flowering quince they say will thrive in almost any soil. This one is no doubt dead, though its faithful branches reach up and outward, insulting the brittle dry sticks that pin the massive bush to fertile ground. Watery red flowers the color of diluted blood…

 Stocking the Pond                500 bluegill in a tank  on the back of a truck,               parked on the bank,  pouring them out. Fifth grade,               early spring. The year  I was taught there were right               and wrong ways to be  a man. I watched               the waterfalling bodies  of the fish, our pond               like a holding cell.…

After I gave him my dented hands which in any case were still valuable                                                                                   …

Sometimes what kills me is serene as snowfall. Proliferating frozen, soft inundation, the ceaseless and so many ways of wanting to die. I can’t sleep for the 2 a.m. murmur of the plows, making their rounds for hours now, unseeing metal sweeping and salting. Rusted chrome in near collision, compelled by the Sisyphean labor of…

I’m a Kick-Ass Woman Ask anybody. This ass has never been kicked  to the curb. I do the kicking. I’m a nasty-ass woman  drinking chamomile tea at dusk. I know what I’ve got  & it’s a throne for an ass. Grab it. Kiss it. Pop  the pimple on that ass. See what happens when you…

THE CHILDREN   How each one is taken   with care from car  to school doorstep, each one  hand-in-hand with an adult.   How the mothers  and fathers kiss  their foreheads, first  pushing aside their bangs  or smoothing  a stray wisp.  One  parent straightens  her daughter’s velvet  headband; another wipes  dried oatmeal  from his son’s pink lips.  …

Oh the g-d in you.                                                     Thank you for what g-d you did today g-d as gold            g-d as gone                    You believe there’s g-d out there somewhere  among trash heaps that smell less these days                     …

WHAT IF my lips weren’t chapped. the candles: unburned. what if they’d stayed like that all year: whole, slender sticks, separate & shy. what if the ants didn’t run in slow lines across the table, didn’t crush to dark soot beneath a stray thumb.  if I hadn’t touched the cake: unghost the icing slipping through…

with a full gospel choir crooning behind him, with twenty thousand spectators surging to their feet,  with an arena of flashbulbs flashing its approval,  and I’m spellbound, thinking it’s all so spectacular, until  the broadcast team weighs in,  and Charles Barkley says, “That wasn’t the greatest dunk,”  and Marv Albert says, “But the presentation was…