Your Hands, Like Discarded Feathers

  That morning, you told me you were terrified of poetry as a child. You told me stories of vines, stories of the things that continue to remain. I spent the following days imaging the dark circles left in the woods behind your house, looking in.   *  ...

Apartment-Living

  You turn in your sleep, and it is at times like these when I wish you could wake and listen: I am ill. I know there are times when you lie awake, hearing the sounds of another’s bed, hearing the sounds of children running in the streets after dark. These are...

Ekphrasis

  1.   Create for me a river made of stone so that I may look nothing like you.   2.   One thousand moons. Rutabagas at slumber. Soft birds. Each of these have something in common: They look nothing like you.   3.   A girl runs through an...

Hypochondriac

  You and your wings have left me paralyzed—the ‘skeltered wings      hanging like crows’ nests, indefinitely, fusing together like salt and ice. And she said: Please, do not call me darling anymore. The sky still carried some of the incense...

Reading Lynn Emanuel

 inside gertrude stein   Right now as I am talking to you and as you are being talked to, without letup, it is becoming clear that gertrude stein has hijacked me and that this feeling that you are having now as you read this, that this is what it feels like...