the baby stands in the hands of a man
outside the new cafe
having seen treats handed to dogs
he tries to offer the treat in his hand to the dog
he’s the community baby
the man tells us
he never cries
he’s handed between a clutch of folks
all of them are his
he doesn’t smile
he regards each of us
with his precise eyes
standing in the man’s hands
he’s halcyon
knows nothing but standing
having seen standing
so why not aloft
above the dog
over the sidewalk
in the care of the street
in the hands of the sky
Month: April 2026
My Things Are Trash Now Because They’re Old
S sneaks CD jewel cases into a paper bag
Along with plastic apples and bananas
Calls it “grocery shopping”
She’s thrilled to have a job
Now stuffing them into a garbage bag
Nothing if not helpful
Did you wear your headphones
In the grocery store? my wife asks
I hate when people do that
Like it or not it’s my entire life story
Even at 43 listening to the new album
By a 29-year-old as I attempt to ferret out
The one box of organic raspberries
That won’t go moldy in two days
5
Drove home in a pink fog
with the peaks of a bridge
poking through
like the masts of some boat
I don’t know the terminology for
heading out
from the tidal river
to the sea with the town
we’d just blown glowing
in the pink fog behind us
In the morning, they say
it’s a good sign
In the evening much less so
Or I don’t know
maybe the reverse
Tulle Belt
The right tulle for the jaw
the tulle preventing the latch
the tulle forging a jet-black horse’s bridle
the tulle taking its time
the tulle top and then bottom
the tulle bottom and then top
the tulle by the yard and its gates wide
the tulle frothing around the pick-up sticks
the tulle pinned up
the tulle billowed and billowing
the tulle a pillow for the drowned
the tulle ungovernable anywhere but a vacuum
the tulle ungovernable even in a vacuum
the tulle taking its time in the saddle
the tulle taking its time at the altar
the tulle taking its time around the lid
the tulle taking its time tying the knot
the tulle taking its time in front of the mirror
and behind the mirror
and behind
Becalm
Even a dispersed magic
Still glows
Plurals of plurals
Yellow the vowels
A one winged bird flies
Flying, signifying
Trying to make
Something happen
Or at least
Happenings sum
As hap symphoning
Asleep apoems
Or bust, where is bust
Try that too
Practicing praxes
The up gazes down
Dreams of dreamlessness
Excesses of lesslessness
Hand eye coordination
Tongued tongues
Their Sisters
Aunt Kathryn said salt and sugar shot out of Dutch show chickens inhabiting the golf course since before she was born, since before the war before she was born, and before golf was invented.
Every Sunday, the strongest boy with the smallest hands shoved pellets of imported grass and gravel down their gullets. The problem was, when laughing and lights from night parties woke the chickens up, they marched into the ballroom and climbed up peoples’ pants and pantyhose, onto their laps, and flew at their heads…
Or was it Aunt Marilyn? “They seemed like bikers, but their growing brains just wanted to party”? Oh, that’s a Marilyn statement, all the way. That just. In Marilyn’s stories, animals always won. If they lost, she’d slash your tires, and she was an excellentgolfer.
In Kathryn’s stories, she’d bred Fluffy Dutchers all her life. And her father’s father’s father. Here’s a photo of three she defaced with her initials. Salt was for packing wounds— sugar, too (see “Sugarfoot K.E.K.”)—before, during, and after wars—and to make War Pickles, dipped in iffy cream.
I WANTED A NASTY BOY
I lost my voice
It crawled into a hibiscus bloom
which wilted and fell off
then gobbled down without taste by the dog
who had diarrhea out in the woods
A coyote licked the soup off a pile of leaves
turned around thrice and had babies
the babies ran through evolution so fast
one turned into time
and said your life is really long
time is not short at all
It’s not even time
Eleanor, We Have Put These Difficulties Behind Us
Come to me she whispers But what about the potatoes
Fingers that taste like butter sweet then sickening Excuse me,
A sickness rushing A tightening of throat An alarm going off
oven is pre-heated Put the coated potatoes into the oven
The wave of heat remembering Once a quickening of the heart
Seems like just the other day Like any ordinary day then a kid
Been at this at it for a decade What comes in tens? Not eggs
MIRROR BALL – shard
but for fucks sake is sound a mirror of sound
tone of tone language is a gesture
the way the horizon rends two directions
4
I’m not sure I believe the summary
of the experiment
of the women
and the piles of worn shirts
The collared and the torn
The frayed elbow
The scuffed snaps
flaking white paint
Laundry is pretty concrete
You’re washing & folding
a shared idea once
or twice a week for years
Gently putting each other
into neat little drawers
You do mine
& I do yours
Roses Came Up in Outer Space
I used to love space and now a photo
Of Earth makes me nauseated
Shit happens for reasons I can’t explain
Like how I used to detest olives
And now I could eat them by the handful
Maybe the zodiac messed with my gut bacteria
Maybe there’s something to be said for
Instagram astrologers crashing out on the feed
Still annoyed with myself for seven days
In Greece and not a single olive
Maybe I’m entering my villain era
Or maybe it’s finally come to a close
I have yet to teach my child
If there are roses there are thorns
I appreciate the weather
I appreciate the weather, I appreciate your time and I appreciate
that you’re pretty chill, that you won’t conflate this yawn
with an actual commentary on whatever it is you’re saying.
I can’t rollerskate. I wake up at dawn rolled between covers
and my two children. That moment when your child discovers
they like dancing and listening to music, like laying in the dark
alone with headphones on. The hawk hovers for a moment,
then flies on. The beauty of car parks at sunset. I embark
on an adventure to put things away. This concept of place
that keeps returning to kick my ass, as if every place weren’t
many places and many trajectories. I brace myself for a day
that’s already past with its own weird grace, the grace inherent
in any space of time. Trevor says Levi Strauss’ concept of the
mytheme is impressive and bogus. What if the Sermon
on the mount was in a valley? It definitely wasn’t in a cave,
I say, but that too is undetermined. Brain ways move much
slower than the speed of light. I smile at a random person
because she smiles at me. She is not a robot, she is not AI
or a deep fake in the large language model race which worsens
with every capitalist incentive. I don’t deny using Chat GPT
to ideate. I am compromised. I am not implying anything,
I’m saying it. I have never seen a lapwing. My brother
Bryan says I should go back to China. No more two-day train
rides across the country sitting next to bags of garlic, before
I was a mother, I mean before I grew two babies and two extra
organs to feed them in my womb. That’s what a placenta is.
I complain about work but I am lucky, have attained the kind
of employment I used to dream about, but not the hacienda
I still dream about. I’m always a little surprised to wake up
In Washington, D.C., which is not the TV version of America
The TV version of Washington, D.C. is usually Baltimore. Coco
picks buttercups and I put them in a small vase. The esoterica
of gardeners is something I aspire to. Although it is Friday,
I know no way of improving the world, except to be kind,
love my enemies, etc., which I mostly do. It’s easy to love hard
to like. I never visited my father in Bombay but I should have.
I bought a Lonely Planet India and outlined a monsoon-season
appropriate itinerary, but I was disinclined to rely too much on
my father’s charity. Now I wish for more of it. If I played chess,
I would only get to check mate by accident or error, even though
I was in the honors society in high school, which was thirty years
ago, when my impropriety was minimal. I like to talk about
being ungovernable but it’s not true. I’m a part of the gears,
same as you. A devout non-believer who doesn’t need to chill
the fuck out. I am responsive. Look, we’ve all tilted at windmills
and hoped beyond hope. Reading Don Quixote is one way
to develop a solid vocabulary in Spanish. Trevor did it once.
The buttercups are wilted despite the vase and water. Should
buttercups be picked? Lawns should not be mowed but instead
should grow full of flowering weeds. My bead collection is mostly
old prayer beads. Bones and stones, no falsehoods, no trying.
Interloping
To have a home
You start with land I think
And be there for a while
With your body
That has to be somewhere
Light and courtly
In the nest
Making noise
The full regalia
In the dictionary
Words defined by each other
Like feelings without brains
The red your eyes give
Colors of no world
So generous!
The entropy of
Putting it down picking it up
Now where’d you put it
The whip knots up so fast
The cord and the bark fuse
The past is where the bodies are
A neighbor comes over
Across hedges, down corridors
Asking for salt
Has that happened to you
Do your salts run low
As sugars accumulate
The seed won’t sprout
Unless overwintered
Needs seasoning
Pour yourself
Into your body
Have you wintered enough
Cats and dogs and poems
Are free
Adverse possession
Here is the stump
Of a branch
You didn’t cut
You want words
Only blue plays
Among red bulbs
Overhearing, overseeing
Overtouching
Grazing shoulders in recline
Your home address, speech
To underlings and groundlings
Hoi polloi
What other polloi
Have you encountered
Neighbors are also diagonal
When you don’t pay for it
Everything is free
Villain
The most important thing we can do in this life is forgive,
a medium told me once. She offered no reason for this.
But what of the gaze of the man who harmed me?
At my brother’s wedding, we stood for the first time
in a social circle. We both remembered his fist.
The most important thing we can do in this life is forgive.
His eyes, dark with aversion. The way in the room
in the basement he trapped me. Was I nine? Was I six?
So what of the gaze of the man who harmed me?
In so many ways, that room is where I was born.
He delivered me, naked and wrenched and sick.
The most important thing we can do in this life is forgive.
Last night, a ghost tugged at my feet and I saw her
flash past me, my nocturne, my prismed abyss.
And what of the gaze of the man who harmed me?
I waited for her return, my cats curled along my body
as in two lungs. I was alone. I’d always been alone.
The most important thing we can do in this life is forgive,
So what should I make of the gaze of the man who harmed me?
Becuzzes
Enough with elipses because. I watch
the monster movie mouth open because
that’s how I’m steering the maulings because.
See the silence bubble up Family Feud ding!
not sorry because. Just climbing on stage
is a giddyup because. Climbing on stage:
is jacoozis because! Do I I you mouthing
I, Godzilla or May Godzilla grate its graze
on you because. “Her mouth can’t park
in the We Lot because?…” I can’t real it
really because. ie Her mouth writes checks
her ass can’t park in the Me Lot because.
Eleanor, We Have Put These Difficulties Behind Us
An idea of dinner it started with the potatoes Ever since
Scotland Emma likes to call them jackets Weather was a bit
blustery the beginning of Spring longing for winter Flower petals
clogging the river a necessary jacket day A day for a jacket but this zipper
There was something wrong with the zipping Spilling from her lips
gossip about a mutual acquaintance Maybe someone’s got a crush
With the flat part of the blade Crush the garlic pluck the thyme
Movement in the other room skittering of feet Take the soft butter
Coat the skin of the potato Salt the potato Waning light of afternoon