Poetry

Tonight the harbor is the sea: waves thunder, detonate on rocks, slosh over the seawall. The glaring moon has dissolved the stars. Few others are out, it is...

The fluorescent light seems to struggle against death. Not dead yet, the fixture pulses every few or several seconds bequeathing humility to the shadows. The light is beacon-like...

Late spring, nights still cold, the stars clear as spotlights, people I love keep dying. Every week a different shocking loss: cancer, gunshot, embolism, suicide, on and...

we don’t wait for a wedding. on any average Tuesday, we plunge our fingers into expensive containers & paint our faces gold. we dress in silk &...

I know—I know, sorry! Sorry. It’s this basement desk, this heavy rain, that has me thinking of that wet poem, book one’s great flood, the threat...

And here she is: thirst. A parable about a drowning man. A skull found by the edge of a river. Gully of a mouth, bank of a woman....

Fire is an aria, not a red curtain. What survived? A filing cabinet, a pair of diamond earrings, a skillet. Fire is a contest, not a medal. What...

The yell that arose from the shallow grave at the base of my brain to interrupt my son as he reached for the late lone tulip— death-vaunting goth...

The god of destruction has finally chosen the time to reveal himself in his vast formless Picassian glory. He treads horned and naked through the elegant...

Summer in Chicago. Day five with the cousins. You are with your sister at a different lake. When you come home we will divorce. We have not told...

This morning’s news comes as relentlessly as it has for weeks, and today I watch as Hasidic Jews bury their dead by the hundreds in Brooklyn, rabbis sitting...

“Like a swift migrating fish, the word cellulite has suddenly crossed the Atlantic.” —Vogue (April 15, 1968) Come, sea ripple. Come, ocean swell of the world that...