Category: Poetry

To her question about childhood, he shrugged. Couldn’t figure out how to say it. As a boy, he had tried the choir and quit. Served at the altar for a single summer and fall. Once, he pilfered church wine and rubbed it across a small wound to feel for Jesus. He had studied the Stations…

What does it mean to be lying on my bed and feel nothing belongs to me? The world is…—   Detached? / / Simulacrum??   —have we finally reached the place where the movie I’m watching is more real than reality? The irony: the movie   is The General, from 1926—the movie is silent, is…

My family forked mashed potatoes, peas, and Salisbury steak from Swanson’s TV dinners served on TV trays as a reporter’s urgent voice narrated poorly filmed scenes: green blur of jungle, young men toting guns and ammo, helmets heavy. I read comics as I ate: Batman, Richie Rich, Sad Sack. What did Vietnam have to do…

January comes, and he forgets to look both ways when crossing the street. To say forget implies innocence, that it was not a choice. Light that is not quite morning not yet day sleeping just below the sky’s marbled skin. Morning is another way of saying is it over yet? Over his doorway, he staples…

The Feast of Flowers: A Floral Game of Fortune Adams & Co, 1869   a flower appears in my dream not nodding they don’t always nod and reminds me of Trisha, a florist, who always told me— branches in a field of moss behind her— about arrangements, the structure of corsages, and the languages no…

yourself behind John Rawls’ veil of ignorance. You know nothing about your gender, your country’s stance on faith or border, your age, your health, your assets. There, in such a swaddling, pronounce. It gets much harder, doesn’t it? Suddenly, you become a fan of the conditional. You write in pencil, not pen—   … [Click…

In this photograph, he cannot move–– his right hand will pierce the sky, suspended, open, it cannot touch nor grip nor hold. The sun tangles sap in his golden hair, makes a lamp of his pink cheek––lighting   … [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]