Poetry
bad taste
I would like to have dinner with the man who treated me wrong. / The one who, when I laughed open-mouthed at something he said, remarked: / My, but you have more...
in tongue
That day we argued, I said I was talking about you—I was talking 80 percent metaphor, 20 percent you. I was talking 80 per cent metaphor as if my tongue was a...
letter to a broken dove
Our linen closet is full / of wingless birds. / / What you call a cloud, I call desperation. / / Put away the thesaurus— / failure, death, defeat /...
what I didn’t tell the insurance agent
How time knelt down. And the deer hit my car / like a thud of earth. About the elongated whirl / of the Ryder truck speeding past me on the highway. /...
trop de vert
I am writing all this down—sheared asphalt, / groves of mango and saman, / two white crosses moored by the highway, / side-by-side, ripe with symbolism, / but someone else’s. / ...
driving the 330 from gander
The land has given up, lain down / sulking for miles, refusing to stand / up to the heavy press of snow. / From a distance the shaking flakes / swarm in...
diagnosis
Limned with hoar frost / an alien geography / speeds past car windows, / / a lingering half-moon / fades into the white-blue / / sky; this is the day...
shown on this map:
all the things we let in / to the soft tissue of our bodies— / car alarms, pesticides, oxygen. / Some chosen; some forced: / nicotine, asbestos. Latitude of / learned habits...
present temperature
1. FIVE DEGREES / Somewhere a man with expensive eyeglasses / parses the smell of water / from a shelf of small clear tubes. / He is precise and the perfume /...