Just for the Fun of it
Every once in a while put on every polka dot in the cupboard. Make binder clip clothesline displays of many monogrammed handkerchiefs and scarves. Tally up batches of both suspenders and braces, garters and laces, patches, pocket lint and spare change, stray kites’ tails, rags, bones, and baby teeth. Lay on layers like sediment of ...
Starfish Angel
Back from your ban- ishment to the bottom of the o- cean’s darkest tide, you lug buck- ets of pearls back with you. Salt- white and tear-stained all- over, you’re small, still, but ferocious. Play blazes in you, an entire sea- side of carnivals aflame. Your several hands unravel re- growing to grasp ever- y ...
Gretel Again
Lost herself on deertrails
and rabbit trails winding through
stands of snagged branches,
gloomy hemlock and witchwood
saplings, toadstool-strewn, the sort
of woods favoring cool pockets,
fragrant hollows bushy with rhododendron,
geography redolent with the ether of myth
and history seeped through the pores
like a sap. She places, so ginger
scribbles
someone I love lies sleeping, invisible to me, leashed by dreams. I’ve walked in circles clockwise and still can’t seem to unwind. all the loaves are stone and the sky is bitter with wine. the stairs are so small I can’t step confidently, and the flight disappears up and up around a bend. I’m in ...
talking to myself
Paid nearly a hundred bucks for boxes while a storm rolled in dark out of the west, entire horizon gone steel- grey and rumbly. My stomach these days is unsettled– I drink bubbles to distract it from its own inner misery or whatever shenanigans it might get up to. I swallow the largest doses of ...
Angel
Back from your banishment to the bottom of the ocean, you bring buckets of pearls with you. Salt-white and tear-stained all over, you are still small, but ferocious. Play blazes in you like an entire seaside of carnivals aflame. Your hands and eyes reach to grasp every particle of the unknown universe hanging in the ...
ocean
when the urgency blows in, comes over me, threatens to overcome what landlubberly steadiness I’ve build up with alphabet block by block, primary colored illustrations of trains and toy sailboats aboard, I seek to duck it, to dull it, to drive it from the beat of blood in my ears with great gulps of seawater– ...
Suspension of Disbelief
Reach for the rabbit and all you get is the foot, keychained and spent of luck, oblivious of kicking as you’ve been kicked in the groin by adulthood and gradeschool classmates alike. Softness yields to steel-toed workshoes of tough kids like Rick and Tony who never learned to aim higher. The quickest route to victory ...
dust bowl.
I’m saving myself in a covered dish beside the bed. every night I slough and gather. I’ve done this for more than a year and at last detect drifts of me forming. I begin to have topography, emergent, unmapped. I can’t quite make out the bedouins who cross my expanse, pitching tents by lash-ringed oases, ...
who’s who of the damned
just that. it’s a poem title, I believe, for a poem as yet unwritten.