Three Poems
Can cats tell the difference between a real and electric fire
Does cold air blow in or warm air flow out
Do you have dreams where you fly out a window.
The Social Distance Reading Series
Recent Posts
The Holy Ghost
There we always were, in always again, enjambed helter skelter on a Sealy
Posturepedic neither could leave. Outside cranes pounded the earth, & dead
Endings
Where shall we bury your mother? You asked her once and she said, smiling, why not keep me in the basement? Our basement is a joke, crammed illogically with old toys, kid’s drawings, moldy books, our parents’ teacups and old furniture, our own rough drafts and old taxes. What we just can’t get rid of.
How to Tie One Hundred Knots
A small silver amulet, an imperfect circle, hangs on a string around my neck. One sister got it for me on my birthday. Then another for herself. And one for the eldest, whose heart had been broken, as well.
Two Poems
What is metaled, what is stretched taut enough?
What’s said –an albatross “happens”– back-lit by white and golden flurries of clouds.
Apostate
Through a shop window, I watch a man / strip a mannequin / down to her fiberglass shell.
A Review of Dana Roeser’s All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts
Dana Roeser’s All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts is a book of long, narrow poems that move lightly and deftly from one strand of experience to another, in the hope that such leaps will reveal a single underlying pattern of experience. This hope is fulfilled poem after poem, with the work never feeling overdetermined.
Listener
A balding man entering a tavern, nothing unusual, but a bump on top of his left ear caught my attention, reminding me of Forge. Could it have been my enigmatic classmate from decades ago?
A Simple Question
One cannot prepare for slaughter.
Last month, a cognition test for your son:
Does a rock float in water?
Internal Combustion
In the San Francisco
of my twenties, we were like trees
pressed against each other, larger
than what we longed for.
More Things I Would Tell You
I join a bereavement group
But I last for one session
Marriages over fifty years
Died suddenly
Brain aneurism
Long battle with cancer
I am the only one
Who isn’t crying
From “After Talk”
You touched my chest with your fingertips
as I lay next to you trying to sleep.
“Try to rest,” you said, by which you meant,
Gird your loins, my love, and prepare your heart,
for tomorrow I may leave you.