At the museum of his life, his leather duffle coat is behind glass. It felt like a poem-protection center. It was my responsibility to go home, put food out in the same place every day, talk to the people who came to eat, then organize them, food and poetry being a nourishment that shares a…
Stick in the mud, old fart, what are you doing to get the guns off the street? I am not here to pick on anyone. But now that they have shot Yosi, who ground my meat in Hingham, and his shiny pink meat-truck is for sale, I feel desolate. A gun is a vengeful machine…
This is a poem about a man who is dead. Sodomy laws treated him like a second-class citizen. There were ripple effects. With the aid of stimulants, he spoke like a truthteller and hungered for touch. Even when repugnant, his disinhibition seemed godlike, and what came out of him ravished me. Alas, tolerance builds rapidly,…
Those leaf blowers sure make a lot of noise. Since love is the way, we nuzzle in the morning, but wake up to high-decibel screaming, dust, and exhaust smoke. More and more, being myself seems to oppose the nature of the world. I don’t want updated privacy statements; I don’t want to accept cookies; I…
We were driving North. A sign read, There will be no more wilderness; I thought of my grandfather’s softness whilst hugging him when I was a little boy. It was as if God hadn’t created us naked or defenseless and we had all we needed. It was as if wilderness would never cease to be….
Back when I was a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man I found myself able to summon a range of emotions that ran the gamut from common to not-so-common. The checkout person at H Mart trying to scan my fish sauce puts me in mind of a Roman housewife trying…
Ain’t that God’s own truth? Just one more flame-streaked roadster fresh from the spray-booth.
1 Any one of these masked avengers might be moonlighting as another Captain Rock, might set out not only to censure but incinerate a rich farmer dreading his knock at midnight, a cowpuncher, a calf-drencher, a dweeb journalist, a helmetless jock courting death by misadventure, a negotiator trying to break the deadlock between boss and…
Every day putting a fresh spin on how he maintains that shit-eating grin despite his notoriously thin skin. The quagmire of what-might-have-been. Every day shouldering an invisible tray. Hello, hello. Olé, Olé. His musing on how best to waylay a hiker passing through a field of Galloways. Every day aiming to swat the single fly…
It is a warm winter mid-afternoon. We must understand what happened is happening. The colossus stands before us with its signature pre-emptivity. It glints. It illustrates. At my feet the shadow of the winter-dead bushes wave their windburnt stalks. Their leaves cast gem-cut ex- foliations on the patio-stone—bushfulls of shadow blossoming—& different-sized heads—& in them…
amputation. Above the knee. You r so cold. Winter light moves up your neck to yr lips. For the duration of this song to u mother the cold light moves from yr lips to yr new permanently shut eyes. You can’t rave any more, slapping fury over the countdown of minutes, u can’t force yr…
Why won’t you let me be glory, standing there in the mountainous half-bright shadow, fallen step-by-step down the staircase where a bad smell, urine and something else, unarguably an ultimate flaw, good to ignore years before but now not, not with you there above me, looking down, hardly clear, hard silent, except for cricks on…
