Poetry

I’d have guessed the winter this way, every bitter plum already singing.

By the kitchen sink, my aunt held a fish as if holding the Holy Body.

Lure, yes, you would know how to catch and clean such a thing.

The dugout boats kissing the shoreline have ferried us into open markets. Girl, you call me in time, where this too can be forgotten. The hands that made them asking for more things in dim light.

Welcome to my bed. I have these two beers, do you want them?

The pupils are toothpicks. The lake is a sky with a circle beneath.

He loves me. That’s half enough: he’s the only man around.

Everything hung in perfect balance. Light and dark, heaven and hell.

I'll pick a black card of luck for you: star, pinkmoon, mirror, ostrich eye.

I’m going to save up against the flood and stagger to carry nothing.

It is here I learn the speech of men. The speechless guilt of every swig.

Time is a hearse and horse, a carrot and stick, a window and widow.

Imagine the world you want to live in; make the world in this image.

I slipped one sparrow black and shivering into my mouth.

i was a wild thing down by the river, quiet like wild things are.

Exhausted, androgynous, delirious, I delight in my many parts.

In hushed awe they talk of things to come, a golden time of flowering.

I dug a hole in you; I jumped (here is the church, here is the steeple).

Elsewhere, perhaps here too, regimes stagger, a congress ends.

I told you how I’ve always been attracted to little violences.

I lie down and see you one bed over; therefore God exists.

our minds are not the same if they were the same you would be here

He greets you with a kiss and marries your elbow to walk the path.

There was only the gulf of our steps, our breathing brittle as string.

Before there was air, sublime silence. There was no one not to hear it.

The stars begin to turn clockwise, freeing us of all consequences.

If every present
is possible, how can we have eyes to see?

I drag my sheets as Earth drags her tangled mess of tides.

Even as a child, I was skeptical—testing God when He wasn’t looking.

he has come to write like nervous wasps in my mind like a grocery list.