Paradox
—It’s this darned corset. It binds. No three-way stretch? How very unchic. Vertigo She sketches lingerie as architecture: suspense, a cantilever bridge, a fraught brassiere plunge, the trellis of a corset wasp cinch, medieval in that grand epoch of Merry Widows, girdles, and garters. let the moon go palely incidental, absent the sky […]
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Peter Pan
Everyone is afraid of dying. Aging makes death seem closer, though people don’t always expire in age order. James Barrie’s older brother died the day before his 14th To the family, he remained a boy. Critics say that Peter represents the innocence and selfishness of childhood. In some versions, Peter and Wendy share romantic feelings. […]
The Desert of the Unseen
Four Sonnets for Teresa of Ávila “God walks among the pots and pans.” —Teresa of Ávila I. The Faces in the Sand The desert opens like a wound of light, its silence older than the breath of prayer; Teresa walks where heat dissolves the air and every grain of dust becomes a sight. […]
Field Guide to What Vanishes
In the glass case: a swallowtail pinned through the thorax with a sliver of silver. Its wings still negotiate with air. The label reads: Specimen, 1843. No one has written wind. A schoolchild presses her thumb to the glass as if testing winter. In the next room a coral reef bleaches under fluorescent mercy. The […]
The River Refuses the Past Tense
It remembers the factory before it was called historic. It remembers the treaty signed in a room without windows. It remembers the first boy who skimmed a stone across its spine and believed persuasion was a form of physics. Today it carries a sheen that impersonates light. A heron stands ankle-deep in patience. Its reflection […]
Lingering Smoke
Mid-morning in the late-autumn chill, I look for the auroral rays in the shadowy grey-dark of half-light, like a restless being awaiting love in the city now turned into a fearful, gaping maw. Blinded by the invisible dust, deafened by the myriad clamour, frozen road shoulders are over-populated, wailing in pain of what seems the […]
Good Trees
When I think of home I think of you and me on the marble beneath the Acropolis— my hand inside your cutoff gloves. We are fifteen and the world is us. Let’s run away and the impossible loosens its grip. A warm winter’s day and we kiss under the Acropolis. We run not […]
A Bullet
—golden shovel using part of the lyrics to Boy Harsher’s “Spell.” I have words in me but they’re hidden. You are a bubbling fountain of words, words are like blades of grass to you. In the meantime the snow had drifted against my lips. My light is brittle and cracks upon contact. I am […]
All My Wants
The tree still stands but where are its fruits? The house, like a mouth, muffled now by dust. That soft, brown blanket sieging something once revered. I return home anticipating all that noise screaming That something thrives here only to watch my heart fall Heavy at such cold quiet greeting me at the door. There […]
This Is How
This is how we must remember him now. Bound by the confines of the one cramped room, swatting at the flies that rise from the gathered rubbish, empty sandwich boxes, cartons of milk sour as the thoughts that bring him always back to this one stale space, meandering through the same passage as the flies […]