Category: Writing
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Neruda at a frat party
you ask where the restroom is & i start to weep steam coming from my shadow as you walk away has light always stumbled pursed & curled like a pork rind when you walk into a room? will my teeth crumble like peppercorns if our eyes scissor or i try to speak? i forgive you–you…
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the peak of my literary career
as a boy i collected similes or things like them sorted roadside trash by first consonant put couplets of poetry on my bike spokes like playing cards no one understood or knew where i was going but i was on the local news once on my bike jumping 15 trash cans for national poetry month
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All Ireland.
sky turning dark with sports all gone over; the football and hurling put away for a year, a final show of the end of summer and decline to slow october. all of us decked for the matches, singing the songs and very drunk, all blue like tiny flowers celebrating oncoming frost.
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African cattle.
driving toward home and late after work; shunting over motorways like logs upon a river and we plunge forward, up against pilings of light. ahead, hills shine with breaklights like campfires or fake gold necklaces fallen from an overstuffed box. night falls; it falls before closing and everyone around goes forward past office hours. african…
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Nickel, Unformed
A blue square, a house to live in against a yellow smear of sun how ugly it all seems to me now this safety, the facade of big hands tongues thickly budded with cysts full of lost ambition, a frozen lens of reason, bulky and transparent in their loving if unmerciful gods. No, I will…
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Ruined Pears
“and then be reckless, be reckless, and resolved in returning gratitude.” Gertrude Stein There is a cool cup in my hand held out to you a patent of pears and of ripe, green forgiveness which I must only hope you will drink down, a down comforter for all the sleep that I have cost…
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Sugar Rations
Why would you ration out your love as though it were rare packets of sugar in wartime, brown paper squares wrapped in string, passing hands with paucity and a whisper or glance, stored safely in a cellar by a large brass key, rather than a fresh stream cascading down the mountainside in little pools and…
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Pádraig Ó Tuama Holds Me in the Bed of the Poem
Pádraig Ó Tuama tells me the person is prayed into being by the direction of the light. At least, I think he says this, but I’m distracted by the soft breath of H that he pushes out from the click of his tongue while we bake scones in the house of the poem, while we…
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Borrowed Time
Come sit with me, granddaughter of mine. I want to tell you a story about when I was a young man living in Connecticut in the fifties. As all good stories start, this one begins with once upon a time, but really, it was once upon two times. When I was in my twenties, television…
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Experiments in Time and Place
I wake up as a hair. I wake up as a tree frog. I wake up as a vintage postcard. I wake up as underpants. My waistband is too tight for her—I dig into her hips. I sit in the washing machine all day and all night. I prefer being on than being off.…
