It was on a Wednesday when I woke up early and found monkeys on my arms, small monkeys with red, yellow, and white faces, and black eyes and little furry throats rabid with chatter and fingers not much thicker and longer than the individual letters of printed words. The cashier asked me what was making […]
this poem was begun at 7:49 and this morning I’m a cow or a fish for the first time, starting over, wearing man shoes imaging this at 7:49 can be compared to flying which would make me a bird or something lighter, forced by the wind above the cold smoke stacks to make Os and […]
the poem I wanted to write drew a tree, a mountain, ice, and a man who might have been my brother but he was really watching the river rise and the clang of the anchors– he watches the anchors rise and how the water sworls muddy brown in the center, as if the fish below […]
My aunt who sat when my brother and I were just little tied our fingers to big helium balloons and called up, “Tell your mother about the mountain lions.” I remember closing my eyes. I told my mother: “My eyes hurt from the sun.” She asked what I’d been doing to so hurt. I said, […]
my dialogue with Luke was a strange one somewhat disconcerting. It was at the coffee shop where he addressed me with a cup in his hand, a book in the other, about which, he said, he regretted what he’d once written and now couldn’t take back as it’s the nature and weakness of books, as […]
not even the scientists when asked could say what that thing was that had crept on shore the day after the shipping lanes were closed it had brought bubbles and when asked one of the scientists said, no, we won’t know why they don’t pop until more data is generated when asked a scientist said […]
after the english storm everything changed puddles instead passed back memories as it used to be that in a puddle you could see the airy birds reflected or lamp posts or the edges of buildings but now in those puddles after the english storm that other me I remembered that me who’d been asked as […]
It was a day like any other they always are when suddenly my brother Daniel, his girl Melissa, and my odd neighbor Henry suddenly turned into pencil marks on the couch and the couch too and the geometric painting I’d made years ago which I swore had once been more colors than just black and […]
how many poems have there been where everything’s a specificity of edges and outsides and the sun is narrowed on the floor by the western window keeping warm how many poems have there been where the reader knows shoes take one onto the roads of the day the windows pass overhead one by one behind […]
I’m troubled sometimes by the landscapes we stumble on such as yesterday after everything had melted and where the earth once yielded land I found myself on a length of paper into which at an angle the earth had raised a thin spar or post or treetrunk wrapped around by red ribbon or the exposed […]
and here is now where they stand with their fruit plates, meats, smiles, other comforts and casseroles while behind me and behind them the world is a disheveled poem yes here is where they stand on the door I used to open the hard matter of the walls somewhere maybe in Alabama, Texas carried in […]
imagine the poem I want to write as a train into the city on which one day I open my mouth to speak and every stone has vanished and the snake I once used to dig for chipmunks in the yard has withered like an old wrung washcloth dropped onto the sand I want to […]
I can never remember the poem I want to write like what I had for lunch a week ago even though I try never to risk what I have but there’s a question what is the poem I want to write but misremember what’s the nature of it (bird, plow, tire track) why does it […]
Key: Black is read from top to bottom, Red from bottom to top Thanks to Kendra Bartell for the Canvas.
This I just couldn’t resist.
