from John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” How many people came and stayed a certain time, Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you Like light behind windblown fog and sand, Filtered and influenced by it, until no part Remains that is surely you. * When I was… Read More A Favorite Snippet of John Ashbery
—a poem influenced by Philip Levine In that moment, my brother was beautiful: it was after visiting hours, nurses unaware of the car parked… Read More The Day My Brother was Immortalized on a Piece of Oversized Canvas
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. * They were like tall flowers, bruised… Read More Your Hands, Like Discarded Feathers
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 rudimentary: the skin… Read More Apartment-Living
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 left over from a lunar rain, craters full of something other— something that… Read More Hypochondriac
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 to be inside… Read More Reading Lynn Emanuel
Flutter and burn, you turn almost sideways, glinting like those who lay un-described and silent. Lackadaisical birds. Tell me something other than your two methods of circumference, the legality of chloroform, the two figures lost in the dark on the other side of winter. Tell me once I am lost in the middle of… Read More My Love For What Resembles
(I apologize in advance; this poem needs a lot of work.) Psychology & Wine 1. At first, when she was nervous, the girl peeled the skin from the back of her heels—nibbled her lips, crimson-blue— until they were nothing but pulled onions, the pale moons surrounded by red clouds. Lunar landscapes. Created in silence. 2.… Read More Psychology & Wine
It was on a night like this when I stopped trying to find you. Your body disappeared, and I was left in a sea of white linen and feather-down— the area around the bed and the main hallway like a thousand corridors. Antelope filled these halls, their eyes turning into many dark stratospheres, and in… Read More Early Signs Of—
You often says things in which I can say little in return—my growing deficiency—and the sky turns yellow. We lay a blanket in a field in the middle of nowhere and return to find it covered in earth that cannot grow. We lie in this space and stare into a sky filled with clouds that… Read More Speech Impediment
SPRING MORNING It is without a word that you follow me outside like a lumbering shadow. We reach the sidewalk, our steps matching. Wind tangles in my hair as we pass apartment doorways and windows. It is when we see the shadows of two people making love through an illuminated curtain that we realize I… Read More A Poem–different from my usual work
