Poems

My daughter molds a gun from bread. Why do gods make us eat? Witness divine stovetop resurrection of yesterday’s sides! I scrape my plate. August, so long, sweat

Open the great red drapes—three dozen brass rings clattering on a brass rod above the picture window where I, nearly sixteen, wait in a splash of clothes on a plush, carved settee while the Berlin Wall

Greet me in a dead tongue when I rise from my sunken bed—Godana dag! (Gothic). Mama's here, my necromantic swamp, good evening all afternoon.

Daydreaming is roller-skating backwards to a couples' song with a red jean banana bag—alone, not thinking—tons of lights on iodine-looking walls. Wallflower girl couples and the County Fair daisies, roses on their cheeks crack when she goes by so her banana bag

First words out of my mouth he say: My, my, you're not from around here. Every bone cry hie you hence but in uniform he's out of this world. Brass chicken hawk on brick wall exposed read fifty degrees.

My mother calls to say she isn’t dead but choked on a cheap kebab. You say you’re a writer. What’s so tough it won’t go down?

Fuck spring. Spring’s a punk in rose leather who sings under lacy stars, stars the night bruised around:

Some folks don't believe in birds. A big old black bird landed right there dropping its wing down off our roof. Right down the center of the house. Sure enough, that's where we found my dog dug out under the kitchen.

They'll read something like it somewhere— wronged one longed all along for the long gone wrong one wool over this one's eyes, steel wool

Always with this smashing, muddy river. And my child vexed. The white sky her screams crested. The white coats rounding the kid wing. Where histories were charted, looks gauged. Under my touch. Scrolled symptoms and elevators. Chimes.

My whole body's a hand up inside the hole of some lacquered clock reaching— What word or other have you now she's in her tracks stopped, what more than slow up for me, hey? Ta ta

Then. It took off. An ark was the ribcage of a horse a dog drags and gnaws and drags past a world of curs left behind.

Not big on pilgrimages, yet this fever drifts from house to house. One leaky pirogue, adrift, empty, listing to one side, on the bayou. I look inside my neighbor’s yellow house—joy

The pig’s hindquarters flip-flopped; a cane, finger’s length, into its vagina slid. Meet its eye; your fear to the wayside dropped.

The dead girl decks herself in redbud, red algae, red-shouldered hawk for you She swims through reeds to your sick room She burns sassafras in the mountain cave She steeps black elder tea She reads is smoke is smoke is smoke She hangs gourds in...

The court was everywhere and always open, so everyone on the lam in rented rooms toasted me the night I turned twenty-one. We left men thirsty as blank canvases. Again my friends and I ascended the night like steam. The court was everywhere and always...