Just because you call this home doesn’t mean home is not a form of self-defense. A band-aid heals but remains a barricade. The flag waves but has no hands. Mexican-Americans pour over lower borders like beetles from a moist log but they still die parched.
[from "The Ring in the Rain" published in Lingerpost]
Things I’ll never say again.
Settle, instead, for dictators and awful.
Treasures are stored inside
stories passed on as pickled
cauliflower recipes or mountains
rising mid-nose or a taste for sun
with teeth. Emotions are held back,
stockpiled into traditional forms.
Agony: a folk song old as wind.[from "Holy Bread" published at Eunoia Review]
It was Mabel’s idea. Everything from the temple to the mattress was Mabel’s idea. She read about the mattresses in a book about woodland Indians and the way she told it I was sure she could teach a class on the subject. So we sat in the temple and tore out hundreds of pages and wadded them up in our fists then unwadded only to wad them again until the paper was soft and smooth enough to feel the cotton inside. Soon only the covers were left.
[from "Doppelganger" published in *82Review]
Whatever footprints persist
none of this is separate as it seems.
It was, after all, the Frank O’Hara poem,
that went through several hands
before it left me warmer
within your arms’ parentheses
the punctuation marked a girl
and how she lied to a perfectly
good poem. Whatever she quoted
you or him, the poem is the part
she can’t recover with our regret.
[from "Incident Concerning A Poem By Frank O'Hara" published at Logophile]
You call it unknown but what of me have you known and what more supple mystery than the nights of a creature who bleeds by the magnetic force of the moon.
[from "53/New Forms", a series of letters to Arthur Rimbaud
published in Lockjaw]
