Poetry

Is what you reckon.
Upper lip, brindled. Pubes, lichen.
Brackish armpits; thigh-thickened

chicken. A wank on the way
to other women. Box on a stick;
wake of peckers. Stupid

with bravado yet brutally
forsaken by self. I rut
in her blood past the bracelets.

Fus...

The sky’s an homage to planned obsolescence.
It’s rocking a case of feature creep, clouds

like drool blooms filling a pillow faster
than you can say: Careful or your face

might get stuck that way. This cloud leans in
like an unfinished limb activating a...

Flies dart over the broad back of the corpse,
wrestling among hairs and crawling the stilled eyes.
They’d found it at the reservoir under partial light,
the unplumbable mire a clot of scum, splayed insects,
catkins from a near alder, an ochre float of...

The bear was named after the guy from M*A*S*H,
The incorrigible troll with ESP,
Hearing as fine as a woman’s eyelash

And a revolving roster of spy holes
That opened onto the nurses’ shower
Precipitating above an eyeball.

His voice went out from the PA...

Natural beauty shares the weakness of every promise
with that promise’s extinguishability.
--Theodor Adorno

Large-pored, swaddled in pith, they swell
in the Andalusian heat. Each tree has promised itself
right up from the ground, branches full of dying...

Somebody left the world last night, and last, and
last, and last: wild is the glower of wind, and words
too thin, too meek to shelter. Lament in rhyme, she
says, lament in roses: he was, and is not! It will
always be darker soon, colder, you who are...

Must you flush the toilet
while I’m in the shower?
That’s a metaphor. It means:
one system, contrary aims.

Let us say that I have come
from beyond the Lyme fields
and ironworks of mortal men.
Would you flush the toilet then?

It’s a yes or no question.
Sometim...

You won’t end up on Easy Street if you wear that hair-of-the-dog shirt.
No amount of rehearsed apology will get you to Carnegie Hall.

We’re bittersweet? Then let me count the ways, I mean, the petals.
O let me plant my kisses all along your neck of the...

I should stop smoking. For in my body, the world’s largest moth
closes her wings over Georgia, U-pick tomato fields,
red ripe plump lungs I had back then, dew wet, pungent, we can’t
all be tough fruit, juicy—I miss mowing fields there in a bikini
across...