For Whom the Resurrection is the Full Moon Rising
By Poetry Issue 80
Gauzed shine on the infinite, the moondog blooms like a distant searchlight left of the moon, almost unmoving to the naked eye, as if tracking a slow-drifting object, like one of the balloons wafting into North Korea, balloons with winter socks tied to them, or one of Chagall’s ethereal blue bodies above a nameless Russian…
Read MoreAs Saint Mark Says They Mustn’t
By Poetry Issue 80
Then the river I hadn’t found held the rivers I had ransom. I knew I wouldn’t find it. I would leave where I wanted to stay. I was convinced we pay no other price. Then the river I hadn’t found held everything I had. The way belief holds proof so we forget. I could hear…
Read MoreNight and Chaos
By Poetry Issue 80
Once in the desert he said he saw the shape of a man, a body, the line around it neither light nor dark standing speechless in his path. That he could feel his shirt draw back against his body his mind was already giving back to fear until the figure turned to yield and let…
Read MoreSalt Wife
By Poetry Issue 80
Cured to permanent gown, a mineral seep—all tears, all weep. The lick I am. The lips I’ll crimp in the swap of elements—the more of them, the more I melt. My backdrop old smoke in the shape of tents, my city most flagrant in absence— gutted cavity under the stilted SOS of stars. I have…
Read MoreAltricial
By Poetry Issue 80
What offers a skeletal peep. Feather-smear, mostly gullet—agape for the secondhand upchuck grub, bolus crammed iridescent with carapace and wing. A holiness, this helplessness, the mother’s tireless, kenotic reconnaissance ending every time with her head bent to her nest of tidbit beggars, X-ray translucent, the tinder of their bones radiant beneath. All hollow. The aerate…
Read MoreAccording
By Poetry Issue 80
In my mouth the name of God an overripe pear: a grain, a grit on the tongue. A grail, all vowel-shaped gaps, like lipping the rim of an empty cup, that low-frequency opening undoing, unhinging the jaw. God’s name as eyetooth, meat-intended, a visible skeletal hint. God as salve for chalk. For the bent heart,…
Read MoreEvery Day I Touch Things
By Poetry Issue 84
Autumn came before I realized. Sharpness flew up like gull-cries, the swan turned upside down in the water, pulling up grass, rolling its big hips upward, which made me wonder if words are necessary for pleasure, if without them, sparkles on the water would be useless baubles. I have so many of…
Read MoreLa Cicada Familia
By Poetry Issue 81
Like an old Victrola, its needle stuck In the groove where the flamenco dancer Patters her firecracker feet to the floor, Machine gun maracas, so the cicada Pays homage to its clattery muse, She who pitied the flight of Tithonus Withering eternally through his dog days, So the myth tells us,…
Read MoreNow I Lay Me Down
By Poetry Issue 84
But instead of pressing palms tight as I was taught, I cup one palm over the other— fingertips to wrists— before my belly. This is how I show God what I’m asking, how I direct God’s hands to dive into my husband’s gut where cancer harbors in the sea of his bladder— a dark hulk…
Read MoreHymn
By Poetry Issue 84
Some of the things I was not doing at the age of twenty-two: learning the Latin names of flowers (or even their English ones) living abroad recording music with the intensity & abandon you hear on every single cut of At Last! on which Riley Hampton’s orchestra’s a tame & obliging brook under storm-spew’d sheets…
Read More