POETRY

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
You can’t make them love you, no matter how artfully you betray yourself

Try not to see your own predicament in every fucking thing.

Vase

The storm passes without snow.
The car waits loyally in the back lot.

Lavandula

Listen to me: I know
the winter gloom in
mid-summer…

Despairathon

You’ve spent a lifetime training
for this.

REVENGE SCENE

Okay, picture this: We’re in an elevator. The elevator shuts down. It doesn’t matter where we’re going, only that we’re alone.

Ode To the Dove Pt. VI (Avrom Sutzkever)

Yes I am guilty, I’m guilty. A sin was desirable then.
Bring the dancer back to the stalks.

Letter To a Young Poet

Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”

robertson quay

how does an afternoon turn
on its axis?

An Endeavor of Being Now

We stop doing dishes while
a mile unwinds
from the tree outside.

A Way of Seeing

Just starlight and some small scribbling across vinyl.

Dis Place Ment

People have always coped with flooding, and they learned to cope with death.

All In

I don’t
know why
I’m in the garden
kneeling on dirt

The Kotel in Jerusalem is Filled with Cracks

We found in his suitcase T-shirts, his siddur, gifts he bought for his grandchildren…

Mom, in Her Dementia, Steals Oranges

and apples, mackintosh mostly, but any kind left in The Pub
at the Assisted Living Place

Landscape with Ash

You are strange, my mother said, dwelling on the past.

Hollywood Hills
the remarkable thing

I am still waiting for the lion

Getting Postcards From a Piano Showroom

The two of us toast to a man we both love, to whatever degree, clink our glasses and laugh…

appetites

you quit wearing pants
loaf around your yard
in hole-nipped panties

Babylon

If America is Babylon / and you are an exile / newly arrived among pagans / Catholic, ‘Ngolan, Black, woman / you already know how to pray