Poems in the Rooms of the Dying
On the subject of serial killers, poet Ruth Danon writes that they “leave notes, write in code.” They “grow increasingly impatient.”
“They hate the dark,” she muses. “They want to be found.”
So do poets. And Danon’s latest collection, Word Has It (Nirala Publications, 2018) reads like a series of notes dispatched from the brink of an apocalypse. Birds fall from the sky. Red-eyed people weep. There is blood. Dark, ominous omens of all shapes and sizes rain down.
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Mystery, Menace, and Early Sorrow
*Notable Essay Best American Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2018 The dolls never slept. They stayed wide eyed and unblinking on their shelf in my small, overheated room, watching me watch the man and woman in the apartment across the way. As a...
Two Poems
One can hold a crossbow and a pussy / Willow with the same affection. / One can dream her own body in the arms / of the blue Mary
No One Should Feel That Alone
Jane was handing someone a bouquet of satay, / gushing about Muller’s Foreign Cinema and Laszlo, / when I told her about the abortion. A party / not the best place to breathe new disclosures, to say: / The baby would be three years old now.
Homecoming
Finally the war was over / we could go home but / wife was wary. Those houses? / said, watching the news. / >Those stores? schools? police? Fake. / believe what you see.
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Spartanburg
She took the knife out now. Richard had just risen, the mattress swelling with the forgiveness of his weight. He paused at the bathroom door, the light behind him throwing a shadow on the outline of his taut belly. A stiff, wiry hair, strong as an antenna, pointed from his middle roundness. Clara Jayne had the overwhelming urge to pluck it. Maybe even to suck it. He said, “I’m so glad we’re doing this,” “this” meaning the child he wanted and she didn’t.
Two Poems
It’s not like he can just be a rich dude, / my friend says of a guy we know. He has / enough money to keep him from finding / a job, not enough to just work on finding / himself. In money there are so many wrong / amounts. Zero, for instance.
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