More on: Poetry

Matthew 4:1–11 Leather-winged I wheel over dunes. Dimpled crests resemble rippled seabed sand. Peering through the centuries I witness future blots: rusted armour, helicopter husk, sphincters in the dirt where mines blew out. Striations made by scream. But now a figure clarifies from distant shimmer-heat. What myth do you believe? In one, I was the…

Attention truncated yields torture. The saints’ patience flames on the furthest continents of faith. “That burn doesn’t seem to want to heal,” writes Simone Weil in her journal; not far below she notes the price for best Italian ices. In the Sistine Chapel, the last hellmouth glows like a room whose absent owner left lights on as illusion to prevent all realities that…

“‘Container of the Uncontainable’…doesn’t fully convey the sense of the Greek. I think a better translation would be ‘fits the unfittable,’ but that just sounds awkward…” — NICOLE ROCCAS, TIME ETERNAL —————————-1. There is no angel. —————————-2. There are cicadas clicking like a ——————————-vinyl record stuck on one relentless ——————————-everlasting note. There is occasional ——————————-lowing…

I. I come into this world on a pair of earrings—a coil of light on her spined ear—hoopoe birthmark at her nape sifting the heft of the dhow—through her hair she wears the heaviest bells——ears cupped in shell weather she knows the price of a ticket across the black waters is not possible——— bismillah is…

god is the warm smell of a vcr —————————–in a room that feels safe. violence sits like a dog at the door, —————————–but god is the door we closed when playing playstation, —————————–the beanbag chair we shared. the door is now open, —————————–and there a man stands, looking like jesus torn from his cross, —————————–staining…

Duck-faced, the serio-comical sermon / Goes the way of confidence art on / A Holy Week spree of Menippean arson. / Heat without light.

A poem for the thin places. “I looked, but I saw / no craftsman, no tools. The buzz buzzed on.”

An elegy for the Flintstones. “It’s a trog-eat-trog world out there.”

Sometimes in the sound and the light / it grows so still / it’s possible to forget / you are moving through the air.

Night hadn’t brought forth its cache of new stars. / Nor mimosa trees folded their leaves. / She laughed, a bold and sudden laugh