You left your whiskey on my bedsidetable, your curlers beneath the window,you left my heart feeling like glass.(At least it felt like something.) The hickorychessboard had all its pieces moved sometime—what is this smell outside my window? Your car exhaust? I could smell it on your fingernails, the exhaust.Do you work often, leaving things on… Read More Whiskey Aubade

damn it, huck,when that fancyman comingwe been drifting two thousand dayson these shitty rivers with our souls,waiting for some place to leave ‘em innone of them knocks is him just some big dog screamingor some vagabond kickingdown trees in a forestthat doesn’t have no lifeno grazing deer, huck,‘cause their own damn godsaved ‘em and left… Read More The Huckleberry Lament

nineveh none of it done by a son of a gun in it aces in holes foretold the damnation of these souls feet clad in wool sheets and hands trembling to raise something just dazed by bright blinding light binding what is right to rights codified and quite disturbing I say touché if I may… Read More new nineveh

from Stuart Dybek’s “Daredevil”                a golden shovel poem  Take a ticket scalper or the hand with an Indian scalp, ese gnawin on a Cuban spewing here’s where you get yours and a cuppa broken knuckles that don’t scream no more, do what you think they gotta do. Start massaging cab door cauliflower ears into… Read More Tough Boy

Would I love my daughterstubborn girldip her father’s knuckled hands into mulchpalms raw from the scrapes she got as she dugin our backyard, plantingapple seedswould my eyes rest over the bumpin her nose as it turnedUp toward the sky with faithin fertile earth Today, rivers swellpast their banksto the barn door and low branches To… Read More Harvest

if god were to exist,i believe there would be a Spinozan necessity. the universe;synchronized, sprungsome disheveled form of free willthrown together like onion skins andentrails in a sacka horrible, violent rush of waterall caught about, arms flailingand fingers crunching god, among usa punishing currentunabashed and left staticad infinitum i only hopea horrific silence would take… Read More rebirth

a tundra of bliss;my fingers weaving betweenswords of grass and unknowing insectslike grasping at bedsheetsbetween the shameand the ecstasyof sex had you ever felt the water swell?had you ever heard the earth breathe —no, heave?some dry heaving, a morning sicknessof morning dew,of a mother pregnant and achingto burst open with life a cruel biology. all… Read More Swelling, Pregnant

Her killer is cannibalistic time:a virulent strain of clocks and moons and tides.for as long as time has eaten time they’ve told the sickyou still have time butanyone on borrowed time knowsthat passing time steals all your time, knowshow borrowed time bleeds like sun before the dusk settlesand dies before the dust settles —anyone on… Read More The Gravitational Constant

Hairbrush crosswalks parting     no-one’s-mother, shoesspilling onto the pavement like a burst     vein – pulmonary. Sixty beats a minute. What is the pulseinsistent on the door – a     taptaptapping firm from          that little blue river     vining around the wrist. Electropherograms remind meof the curl of a scarf in a draft, the grace of a dancer’sartful contortion.Is mine not working… Read More Electropherogram

I don’t know all the right things to say.In fact, I don’t even know the wrongThings.                     “Happy birthday!”                                                       If I knew a wayTo say it smooth, would you believe that IHad found it out with good intent? Or amI just a creep who made… Read More Conversations with a Stranger