Category: Poetry

In Common My father dove through the sky 19 times— once while I watched. No more than four, I only remember his last ten feet and then ground, the parachute like a dress around him. Now, on a drive up to Sacandaga Lake: a diver swimming down toward the trees, lazily falling like a belated…

On the night of the party, looking out from the 8th floor, someone asked, Do you feel you’ve made it? Do you look at all this and know you’ve made it? The inside of me said, No, said, Where? (The inside, like bluish tar, talks fastest, longest.) After, when I hadn’t left the apartment in a week,…

When we walk at night with the ghosts of New York, we float above grates and glass; we have hit our heads on concrete before— we have jumped from buildings, sank. We spent a year wrapped in blankets, emerged drunk, slightly shrunken; we had films for expression, books for quotations, but no banners for our…

Your back turned, a broken compassvibrating faulty,stays shadowed despitethe moonlight-in-the-window. The ghosts living betweenour clothes, the dinner talksof porch lights.The apple-picking offorgotten thought,and allotted time fortouching fingers.I keep my front to your back,my knees closed, jointly pointing. The rain stays south,but not forever. Findwest-bound with your compass.Walk there gently,new figure in the window.I will never…

Sitting in a tub, behind the curtain, with fingers lightly thumping porcelain: after thirty-three hours of praying, she came down from the ceiling. It’s the big blue chair that my mother loved, with upholstery maintained and bottom scuffs, that followed me to Brooklyn. Massive, it didn’t come apart in the middle like lounges made after…

I can’t see the ground around me justumbrellas overlapping in the raineverywhere as people stand.(I don’t own one—with which to overlap or to be overlapped.The wet always comes in anyway.Not with two?But, surely, the wind…) The rain falls in sheetslike summer lined-laundryand I can only think of ruinedpicnics; Cental Park certainly deserted—sinking ground, soaked benches.The…

When I dreamed of screaming, your eyes were a dizzy kaleidoscope. On my bed. The ceiling was our future, wet with paint and silver like lost fog. (Said much prior: I finger in your name on the dust of dressers, on the windowpanes of outdoor shops— I read it on the wrinkles of clothes during…

When I dreamed of sleeping,your eyes were a dizzy kaleidoscope.On my bed. The ceiling was our future,wet with paint and silver like lost fog. (I finger in your name on the dust of dressers,on the windowpanes of outdoor shops—I read it on the wrinkles of clothes during damp days.) My eyes, a strange piano note.Plucked…