Poetry Archive

What I Sought in Bucharest, Summer of 1990 I came to talk Plotinus, Ceausescu, revolution, was given Cioran and everything, everything happened in the cradle of that language where I first heard love you, soft cadences of kisses, a mother tongue. Any fruit promised a taste of marvel, of wine or blood who could say which if transubstantiation is possible If I … [Read more...]

Before I Came Out Pastor Clack fitted me for a roomy chastity belt, so big that it held our church, my school and neighborhood. This belt hurt when I tried to move. One day, near the end of junior year, it just popped off. I left it on the tar and walked home. The warm sun delightfully lavender, the moon wearing a white jump suit. Wedding … [Read more...]

Archaeology Each object that survives us That survives our consumptive affections Our blue-flame greed Balances in perfect Newtonian opposition There’s no removing the counterweights Even if you can’t see them Pressing into the green world Not weight but the shadow of weight They’re too rusted Too close These delicate weld lines These pearls in time Counting … [Read more...]

If a Tree Falls in the Woods … Narrow an eye to a blade of scrutiny. See in a flash how a thing can cut. Imagine the heartwood without splitting the tree; the fallout splicing the atoms in everybody. Sitting at table with you, I watch your eyes track the objects there — the knife, the glass, the peaches on the plate — and feel the movements of your eyes in the … [Read more...]

Epigraph I dreamt Mary Shelley gave me her lover’s heart wrapped in paper    blood dried into shapes like shadow puppets    behind the scrim   shine the light beam  it on the screen    pay close attention as it beats    In the back of testis an … [Read more...]

In Calling Out Somewhere inside me my father is circling the fork of his spade digging the earth. I hold his workman's hankie and wipe his brow without his seeing. Behind, the lands he has crossed with me inside to a garden he makes with my life, unknown by me, but possessed by the seeds in his pocket about to be spread for this new planting that holds me … [Read more...]

50 It’s a crowbar someone left on the side of the freeway after changing a flat tire at two a.m. No one knows how that bar worked its way to the middle of the lane where you are speeding, distracted by an old song. It’s a canoe someone dragged ashore well beyond the water, or maybe the water has receded; either way you cannot launch the boat alone where you want … [Read more...]

Ada Lovelace Pays a Visit It’s all about ones and zeroes, she said, her eyes gleaming like a computer screen, her voice a comforting hum. Maybe someday you’ll understand what to do with them. I offered her a cup of tea, and we sat, thinking quietly over warm mugs, until she asked if I knew the code for a perfect sunrise. I didn’t, so we went for a walk to … [Read more...]

More Than the Dying and the Wars and Our Words about Them To sit here on this roof with the Sierra Nevada mountains in my mouth and the Alhambra’s blossoming gardens up my nose and the tiled brown roofs sloping and arching below me – to sit here and be here smoking, alive, sizzling a bit in the sun. Newspapers say nothing about this. They want to make us … [Read more...]

A Variable. A Choice. A thing shyly revealed should be holy obviously controlled by spirituality and politics not self, like--- a womb, virginity, marriage, the body. Imagine barcodes tattooed like Chinese letters on the inside of your lip alarms going off at--- I’m pregnant, I want you, I do, this isn’t me. But what is holy if not free, if not … [Read more...]

birthday have you once felt inspiration from something ceasing / once, I saw a bird collapse out of the blueness it was once kept in / it plummeted, in silence, and I thought how / nice it would be to find rest on this afternoon / I am mostly enthralled in newness / when I am chained to something / unmoving / I baked my mother a cake on her 57th birthday / because I … [Read more...]

Becoming A Man I am donning a crown of ants from the sidewalk. I am putting an ear to the floor of the garage. Cohabitation. A sky-tar. Impress the girls because (you want to be one). Show them a. Pass on the. A masochistic Michael Jordan. The brush of a feather I can’t hear, is everything quiet? Muss a boy in the Art Institute. Max wins a trophy for settlement. The scope of … [Read more...]

when we move in February and it feels like spring and as a deer gang harass a neighbor’s garden at midnight she sneers can you talk about a dam every day can you feel it you feel the depth can it snag your thoughts unaware a view of a two lane highway granite walls stickman on top salmon boats in Rattlesnake Canyon parades of deer and deer and deer and … [Read more...]

The War A lotus can’t become words—life bleeds out. Still I struggle to engrave the water’s face, the lotic Mess: Daylight speckles the orchard. I long to pin this dragonfly down & press her in a tome, but she defies all essay of inchworm & scissors to sass other worlds within the known. Define this to quell the itch. This: α) I ramble through … [Read more...]

Oral History of a Touch-Starved Maniac Can it be in Byzantium 547CE a king steps from his bath at the same moment I glance inside a Starbucks window and see my own reflection staring back like a wolf lean with desire for the pack to return? Why discount the limits of potentiality? Say the work song is enough to get through the day —do you need more proof than … [Read more...]

Finally, my hands are glowing For all the transgender warriors’ lives lost in 2017 Chico, hear me out, 25 of my deities have vanished this year. Their colors stain my skin and I want them back. I’ll let you slither into my temple, If you give me the spell for resurrection. No, chico, you don’t understand, I am but one feather for their wings, God’s crying too. He … [Read more...]

No Place I started a project for an isolated tree I know googled “unconventional girdle use” and looked at the girdle section on Amazon I showed that tree a video called “How to Perform a Citizen’s Arrest” and laced her up in a plus size bustier to establish myself as a sort of postmodern tree hugger She made me think about Utopia not as a place but a payment - … [Read more...]

I Get Found, 1974 My beloved was born with a pebble in his hand, a red stone burning. He dropped it in the moment between the womb and the catching, the landing in hands, twisted down for just a blink and let it go. Still gleaming from the blanket of beyond, woven thick with invisible threads it melted a hole in that sea-green marble Rajasthani hospital … [Read more...]

46 Kerouac’s walking in the memory snow, in a short story, over the lost diamond, dusk coming on, he’s got to hurry: after the lover’s sonnets, holy psalms; summers of indulgence, this winter of sacrifice. The low down sky; no choice, flakes fall, dome of the Pioneer Courthouse, drifted with mail; I meditate: —White pages, unique, like whorl or iris, unknowable, … [Read more...]