Poetry

Crowned a week before Easter. It is spring. The spirit might have whispered in your ear, as with Mary; the virus could have entered though the eye, through other openings. Your uvula once pink and light as...

The hand that strokes the sleeping cheek will throb with self-control: a pulsing power station. Kindness is titanium. So plant. The seed will burrow up through dirt...

Each morning the same skull fracture, an indented line I trace with my fingers in the shower while washing my hair. The drunk leaning over,...

I lean forward trying to keep up conversation as I watch my father make himself eat. At ninety-six he struggles to keep up his weight. Forty minutes for...

I whisper, Heal us, heal us hope my words find a prayer, imagine it rising like mist— how easy it used to be as a child. The ritual...

King of neither plant nor animal but of mornings after rain / / ghost sprung in the gloaming a memory of betweenness / / arisen in the dark and...

From childhood, on Pitkin and Easton Avenue, I have not been As others were: I have not seen— Portals eclipsed by the clamor of the boulevard,...

Inside the house no snow No wood of footbridges dark with a staying wet in a forest black with green and lore with white But burning hands under...

We need a good soaking rain the kind that grays the sky falls all day puddles on the concrete pours off the roof swells the creek turns it brown & rapid drops...

It races over the Bay of Bengal. It charges through river, paddy, and city. From Boston in my WhatsApp to family in Calcutta, I speak of Arfan. Perhaps...

Paul Buhle: A few words about the poems: These poems could be described as working notes of successive field trips during 1978-83. Poetry, being...

I tied a naked guy up to a bedpost once. I had to go over his instructions carefully before setting out, the door was unlocked,...