TEACHER I know I’ve made a christ of you the way I gather up the crumbs beneath your table, the way I bathe your feet with my hair. But this blind worship won’t do, and I must take and eat new prayer. Teacher! It was not given me to sit at your right hand or … Read more
The Oath The little hand he holds Is all they could find to give him: Wrapped in blue plastic, A hand once brown, now bloodied and black, The hand of one too young for school, The hand of his daughter, Riven in the charred rubble That had been her room, The hand he held so … Read more
Old Road Sign The sere severed plywood sign painted a modest white was nailed once to spindly posts among the water oaks. Now by accident it dangles, peeling and warped. Underbrush too dense perhaps to let the fool board fall. The paint is blanched so that it fairly imitates the mists oft seen in bayous … Read more
Whom You’re Never Told She pleads with her mantras for years—endless In a hill so tranquil, where she is—she always is There she dwells untold, whom you never know—whom you’re never told Bearing the name; Ujung Geni. The Javanese herbalist who cheats Time and death. She broods in her thoughts no other than To live, … Read more
The First of February Well, here’s a pile of puke on a bank of snow, Yoga-pants-purple, budget-cocktail-blue, Lava lurid as a toy volcano, Day-glo confetti frozen stiff as glue. The fire hydrant’s calked in hardened gum. A Phillies Blunt’s in a bottle of Pepsi Inside a purple Shark Week Slurpee, And it looks like someone … Read more
Hats On for the Happy We couldn’t go in person since the car had grown moss inside. So we sat on Zoom in Birmingham, between a Dublin screen and one in the south of Chicago. We were silent, serious. Our separated frames fused to witness the in-person rejection of otherlessness. Two Canadians entered the gallery, … Read more
Calling All Angels Leaves fall like secret prayers— calling all angels September’s having her best orgasm in a century. Everything lingers in climax, the character of the light, earthy fragrances, a whole heaving calendar week with an arched spine. Here’s how I know the world is ill and absurd: a dead fawn stares up from … Read more
Holy Hay I didn’t have a chance to show you the sainfoin I sowed back in May, remembering our holiday in Spain where we kept seeing it in bloom by the road and on waste ground, covering whole hillsides, great cerise stains of what we later learned was Holy Hay. Back here I bought some … Read more
THEY HAVE GAINED AN AUDIENCE with the divine. The plumbline is vertical as the resulting verse, so that neither agony nor ecstasy travel horizontally but curl and rise, sweet smoke from the swung thurible. Perhaps these are the only prophets left to us, still able to loop the loose thread of heaven through earth’s needle-eye, … Read more
THE LONGEST DAY OF THE YEAR Lucky gull chicks on a city roof take food from their parents and snuggle for warmth; for them, life has begun as well as it could. The flightless chick who fell from its nest above and is abandoned by its parents on a hostile gull family’s roof is shut … Read more