“Where are you going? Michael. Michael.”
In the car on the way home after dropping Linda off at the Ferry, my wife begins to complain about me again, one of those harpies eating the liver out of my chest, telling me that I talk about her all the time, even the children said I talk about her too much, and I relate everything to her and she’s sick of it, and she explains that at Mystic Seaport she took my camera away because I was taking too many pictures of her. “I feel like you’re burying me,” she says, “It’s like I’m already dead.” Such a terrible thing to say to me. I...
Read MoreSunflowers (Triolet)
blue sky folds into grey shadow while neon signs brightly glitter a singer’s voice fades to low blue sky folds into grey shadow the diners get ready to go and the air becomes acrid, bitter blue sky folds into grey shadow while neon signs brightly glitter Wild Transitions...
Read MoreBetween your two weakest fingers
Between your two weakest fingers the quarter slips, your wish drowning half in moonlight half held down by your arm –you’ve got an hour in a meter clogged with ancient lakes and marrow with wings seeping through the altitude where north stays stranded in your bones juts from the curb and a little water for your heart –with the first handshake you will forget again, your wrist towed from beside some motionless glass filled where nothing else is thirsty. Wild Transitions...
Read MoreHow to Write a Sonnet
First: seize the world as your subject matter. Understand that its grids, its grit, its effluvial patterns can be shaped into fourteen unwavering lines. Next, imagine that you’re M. Buonarrati, acquiring a chunk of granite so pearlsheened, translucent, you glimpse beneath its stippled ice a magnificent something struggling to draw its first painwracked breaths. Then, tap with your icepick, scratch with your pencil the imperfect surface, crack and dig, scribble and mutilate until the ephemeral entity you claim as your progeny pushes out drenched and wet, slippery and hot-bloodied, ...
Read MoreMy Best Friend’s Mental Illness
sprouts, suddenly, piranha teeth. The morning’s made for sleeping. She angles her head onto mountainous white pillows; they cradle her neck, the gritty seams splicing it; her dirty black hair, fanning across fabric, creates phosophorescent rainbows of filth I long to stroke. I’m always with her on those bleached, dead mornings when she sleeps: I hover, then, over the bed, a quick sliver of light that flickers, shivers, glows, Arctic-ephemeral, shedding a warmth that steals under her chin, steadies her trembling throat. “Breathe, Sweetie,” I whisper; her eyes open and...
Read MoreCut Grass in Snow
All day long night is my storm lantern. I carry it into the farm land cutting into my harvested emotions covered by snow edging them in half in front of me see me open and bleeding. I’m seeded like a small orange pit me out and devour me spit the pulp and seed I step on the jagged edges of my feelings and sense my pain cut stretched skin with glass shavings torture under toes hurt badly with pain. Pitch the stuff with damn black top if it makes you feel relieved. Don’t laugh at me like a circus clown. I’m 61 and my dimples show smiles and crinkles. This day...
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