The light here on earth keeps us plenty busy: a fire
in central Pennsylvania still burns bright since 1962.
Whole squads of tiny squid blaze up the coast of Japan
before sunrise. Of course you didn't show when we went

searching for you, but we found other lights: firefly,
strawberry moon, a tiny catch of it ...Read more

Orlando, Florida
My name is Tara and I'm 55 years old Precious Moments angel statue
I would not classify myself as a hoarder, more of a rescuer of Target receipts
When I first moved in it was just mostly boxes because I was moving in then I tried to unpack but everything just got put wherever Martha Stewart magazines
I ...Read more

I want to grow old with you.
Old, old.
So old we pad through the supermarket
using the shopping cart as a cane that steadies us.

I'll wait at register two in my green sweater
with threadbare elbows, smiling
because you've forgotten the bag of day-old pastries.

The cashier will tell me a ...Read more

then the drunk teen scatters
a cascade of copper on cement,
the old Uncle yells, eyes silver
eyes in disbelief, Pick up yuh
paisa, na man! no worry
on this slate day youths dem
speak no Hindi to know paisa
means money, a taxi speeds
by blaring chutney remix
Kaise Bani and you remember
...Read more

I have a dream
to fill the golden sheath
of a remembered day . . . .
(Air
heavy and massed and blue
as the vapor of opium . . .
domes
fired in sulphurous mist . . .
sea
quiescent as a gray seal . . .
and the emerging sun
spurting up gold
over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out ...Read more

The rising moon has hid the stars;
Her level rays, like golden bars,
Lie on the landscape green,
With shadows brown between.

And silver white the river gleams,
As if Diana, in her dreams,
Had dropt her silver bow
Upon the meadows low.

On such a tranquil night as this,
She woke ...Read more

(for E. and G.)
Hello beautiful talented
dark semi-optimists of June,
from far off I send my hopes
Brooklyn is sunny, and the ghost
of Whitman who loved everyone
is there to see you say what
can never be said, something like
partly I promise my whole life
to try to figure out what it means <...Read more

A rose, rose. A violet, violet. A jade, jade.
No. The architecture of each, a refusal.
Rose is not rose nor violet violet nor jade jade.
But each is what it is, not what it seems.

What each seems is what of each gets seen.
Though what we see isn't the thing seen.

The petals of the rose are violet...Read more

To have
even a
lotto chance

of getting
somewhere
within yourself

you don't quite know
but feel

To cling
to the periphery
through the constant

gyroscopic
re-drawing of its
provinces

To make
what Makers make

you...Read more

Back and forth is a way to move
when the visible is spacious.
But what's the state of the last boat,
lightly loaded and unprofitable?

Tied up at the mainland dock,
the ferry shudders in its berth,

its captain consults a tide chart
and grunts. A new, possessive moon.

Late ...Read more

I won't ever tell you how it ended.
But it ended. I was told not to act
Like it was some big dramatic moment.
She swiveled on her heels like she twirled just
The other day on a bar stool, the joy
Gone out of it now. Then she walked away.
I called out to her once. She slightly turned.
But she didn't stop....Read more

Reed,
slashed and torn
but doubly rich-
such great heads as yours
drift upon temple-steps,
but you are shattered
in the wind.

Myrtle-bark
is flecked from you,
scales are dashed
from your stem,
sand cuts your petal,
furrows it with hard edge,
like flint
on ...Read more

From low to high doth dissolution climb,
And sink from high to low, along a scale
Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail;
A musical but melancholy chime,
Which they can hear who meddle not with crime,
Nor avarice, nor over-anxious care.
Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear
The longest ...Read more

The whales can't hear each other calling
in the noise-cluttered sea: they beach themselves.
I saw one once- heaved onto the sand with kelp
stuck to its blue-gray skin.
Heavy and immobile

it lay like a great sadness.
And it was hard to breathe with all the stink.
Its elliptical black eyes had ...Read more

how hunger boy
mercer must you
brain crane lay

over lap one
dream broom
person starved

down chaff
rain pencil
shaving ego

peck of
pimpled flesh
on fire

eat burnt crane
eat burnt crane
eat burnt crane

who your gods then
...Read more

My body of work is very similar to my corporal body. I often employ traditional forms (Spanx/dieting) but just as often revert to a more copious mode (cake/lazy afternoons). In that I wear little makeup (sensitive skin/feminist stance) I use few purely poetic flourishes except for rhyme-both internal and end line (lipstick/nail polish) conceding...Read more

when we lose track of the person not to be
confused with that democratic fetish
'the individual' when we lose track of that particle
that permeable pool of plasma
the person and take human reality
to be a solid matter (most often
male) of people's (often enough clotted
into mobs often enough mobs...Read more

I know this is an all-black-people-look-alike moment.
So I use the minimal amount of muscles to crack a smile.
All night he catches sight of me, or someone like me, standing
next to deconstructed cannoli and empty bottles of Prosecco.
And in that moment, I understand how little right any of us have
to be whoever we ...Read more

Oh, for the veils of my far away youth,
Shielding my heart from the blaze of the truth,
Why did I stray from their shelter and grow
Into the sadness that follows-to know!

Impotent atom with desolate gaze
Threading the tumult of hazardous ways-
Oh, for the veils, for the veils of my youth
Veils ...Read more