Category: Poetry

I look at reflections through a plate; this is what it’s come down to for not having stepped out since their gardens aren’t for chaste lemons; plants on this turf have not seen weightless days under the sun. The sky hangs them like unfallen rain waiting to be picked, nights scrape their faces for zest…

Most every night as a teenager: my face lit by television, dull and pastel glaze  molting from the small screen. Common comedy. Late-night talk shows with scripted jubilance.  Hard not to see these evenings  as wasted, spent knelt at a vapid altar.  When the shows melted into infomercials,  I’d roll my unfinished body in the…

From the winter’s blue dark, the crows floated in through the open window where my mother and I slept in our shared bed. They came and burrowed under the quilts, one on my chest, embracing my heart. My mother laid motionless. She did not cry and in the blackness I strained to speak but my…

He’s the original Adam, cable-knit sweater pulled down over his missing rib. He’s thinking about ending things with Eve—not because he doesn’t love her, I mean God, look at their history—but because he can’t remember what it was like before he had this slack fleshy gap in his bones, a tender fontanelle that seems to…

The ryokan owner brings our breakfast: morning kocha tea, loose, strong and floating in our own pot, rice bread two inches thick, our own orange toaster. My mother and I pick tea shavings from our tongues, grasping at this needed taste, nostalgia in silence, studying the Zen gardens in the courtyard, the sunlight, the shadow-bodies…

Cicadas ambled up the tree, branches straining moonlight on their glinting shells left behind now, clinging to the bark, furrowed racetrack abandoned for the air. How the race must have changed then, above the squashed red-yellow drupes.  Think of the one  who led, euphoric in first place, only to see another soaring off, to hear…

She is frightened. Surely, something has happened. She has just come from somewhere where something has happened. Hands at her face, holding her spinning head. She is flushed, pinch-browed, squinting hard out onto the water. She is not alone: there are men mere inches from her mouth, simultaneously shushing and asking what has happened, shush,…

After the doctor went over the scan of her bulbous right kidney, I carried Mom home on a jonquil-hemmed road. I offered her water and dealt out seed packets like Tarot cards. She selected arugula sugar snap peas and white icicle radishes. We decided to sow them on Saturday. We’ll save spinach and bok choy…

Tell me the one where he tears you open like curtains, where there is never a window & he still climbs inside. How he writes letters on your walls with the soft scratching of fingers, reeds riding a wind that doesn’t know how to stop. You hear voices this way: scrape, scrape. Brock. Brock. Say…