First Portrait of Maria, in the Style of Dali

You in this sepia-toned photograph, with your arms wide open in greeting, with your hands held up in surrender. Edge of highway, corner of house, hint of something better. A body of water, maybe, or the back of someone else's head. A gun pulled from inside the killer's heart, and he says [i]Mr. Lennon[/i], then smiles, then pulls the trigger. No. I've gotten ahead of myself here. I'm ten years old and in a boat with my father and two of his friends, and the engine has died. The tide is going out, and the only sound is the pull of the ocean. The only heat is the Read more [...]

a small dog, bleeding

it happens this way sometimes, where the children die from the poison that seeps up from underground you vote for one person or the other, and the children die, and it's not war but business, and both words are actually just different ways of saying [i]profit[/i] listen new computers will be given to the schools as gifts the sharpened teeth of priests will snap the bones of young boys in two what you need to believe in are rabid dogs speaking w/ the voices of humans what we do is use the word [i]political[/i] to describe what we don't want to talk about and then, of course, Read more [...]

the theory of sunlight on chrome

your name called out at the exact moment a woman's body washes ashore three thousand miles away or a man pulling poems from the bones of old lovers obvious things my wife and her fears my lack of faith my lack of money the possibilities of highways and of walls the idea of starvation of sunlight through rainsoaked trees and what if the unborn child becomes a weapon? what if the ocean is bottomless? don't believe for a second that any of this poetry don't think that killing the killers is the same thing as justice and maybe it doesn't have to be Read more [...]

the rooms in this house

rain somewhere animals caught in baited traps or the air thick and yellow the sun shapeless and the pieces of a sixteen-month old girl are found in a city five hundred miles away the smell of battery acid like a blanket over everything and the rooms in this house are familiar the bodies found hung from the trees outside have names i've heard before and i don't live here anymore but maybe at some point in the past maybe before the first tiny hand was dropped into a food processor and now i live nowhere while faceless men decide my future fucked Read more [...]

st. garbage, resurrected

in the blue and the purple light on the shadowed sides of these houses in a room with a cracked window and the ghost of edie crawling naked across the floor i am my father at 34 and his own father before him i am the face my children fear and the voice and the raised hand i am the emptiness and the absence of warmth and america is its own form of violence the boy is dead next to his sister in the back of the van the father drives with the radio on softly with dylan's voice dragging itself through my headphones as i sit at the foot of the bed watching april sleep Read more [...]

speaking freely, but in the wrong person

you think about words and about the places they come from you think about meaning about these small beautiful images that the poets polish like valuable stones that are worth the tiniest fraction of nothing and against them you place your grey slabs of self-hatred you talk about the burning girl long after her ashes have grown cold and you remember reagan as a monster as a vampire but you have reached a point in time where no one else wants to speak the truth about the dying you have become a man defined as angry because this is what fear looks like when seen from outside one's own skin Read more [...]

mapping out the here and now

blood on the sheets and you laugh blood on the walls the daughter in the mother's arms and both of them dead the boyfriend picked up 800 miles away says he loves her but can't explain the gun can't explain the rope around gorky's neck or the poet's need to pick at these open wounds the ay the buildings burn without reason the cities where they begin to dissolve into suburbs and strip malls your smile in the weak sunlight of an august afternoon the way you taste all of these things held together by the sheer force of anger Read more [...]

alchemy

each day like filth scraped from the eye of god each moment pure and i offer no explanations when i tell you that both are true i eat dinner while paul hill is put to death i have seconds and how is it that in all the years i wasted in school i never learned about the babi yar ravine? in whose blood are the names of all the slaughtered written? picture the world reduced to those who would invent the machine gun and those who would use it picture mercy as being allowed to die before your daughters are raped remember that malevich had his reasons for painting white on white Read more [...]