You cannot sing yourself to sleep
With hands of starlings Or count sheep when legs are dogs Pulling you down the street Sing the child in bed if you can As water rises over the bland Map of this sad Ohio town A reckless river of borrowed Thought, an inkpot of birds Dancing through your inability …
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Associative Sequence A #3
a bird call is a trap. a fox hound is a tool. and if the goose speaks: turn the lights off and get to bed. the elephant in san diego paints all the oceans blue. the preacher on tv lets the widow know that her dead husband wants her to …
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Driving to LA from Temecula to Have Sex with a Minor Actor Who Made a Single Appearance in My Former Best Friend’s Favorite TV Show,
I keep the radio off thinking I might notice things like the names of streets, or the way trees call light into their upstretched arms, instead of worrying about this actor who’s going to feed me scallops and fuck me and never call me again, because I’m nervous, it’s my …
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Since becoming my son’s only friend, I’ve had to become Baba Yaga.
He wants to get boiled alive in my cauldron. To be eaten whole. Don’t spit out my bones, he says. He wants to burrow his mane of curls back into my belly and beat me with sticks and pull out my hair and sleep his face earthward into my face. …
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song of a bird in a box
seagulls tumble—clothes in a dryer— (through the glass a mocking sky) floating apostrophes to signify dominion over flight, fall. he’s euthymic today, cradles an arm. a bird perched in the corner converses with echos. shakes, approaches the nurse with gray feathers under eyes. (hope, fear, pleading) “sleep, my son had …
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Story of Grandmother
Call this art of witchcraft an art like the poem, paid for in blood, milk, bread. Through the mouth all desires known and willed into being, doing as she was instructed, which means speaking the body of an old wives’ tale, the one where the witch spun is a girl, …
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A Poetry of Absence
The men who waltz into my chest smile as my father would before he walked out one morning and crashed into a swollen thigh. What we truly know—dying is somewhere between ejaculation and a sigh. If he ever returned, we’d fill the empty china still on the dinner table with …
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Half Sonnets/Full Portraits #4
today the dream-eaters are happy creatures: have eaten many winning lottery tickets. left the falling teeth to do their falling. and. inhaled many I wish I would haves. i too wish to be content in the exact situation that i find myself in. in whatever / every moment. like when …
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Becoming the Man My Father Never Intended
+++++++++++++++—after Naked Man with Knife, by Jackson Pollock Fathers always kill their sons, chop them into flailing +++++++++++++++++flesh, grave lives survived in pieces. Sons always resurrect their fathers, the angles of those bodies +++++++++++++++++cutting into each other. The sky is always red. The blade is always bright. +++++++++++++++++My father is …
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