To Chelsea
Clinton. If the name stings, will you wear the veil while tending the bees? When the dynasty burns, will you carry the water jug or the torch? Did you envy the man with the face tattoo? Avoid strangers who claimed they knew you? I do. It’s only a story, says Chelsea. Today it’s me, tomorrow [&he
The Bell Tower
At dusk comes a tipping of the scales— the steady thrum of insects fading into heart-beat silence. Growing shadows feel no absence, but a slipping, and a spreading. A subtler world awakes. I climbed the bell tower where the air is close, anticipatory, penetrating the depths of dusk, which is tight
Thoughts on the Death of my Father
(Nappies aren’t supposed to be for grown-ups. Grief, not crusts, whips hair into curls. He does his dying, is gone; still the nurse’s day […]
Belleville / Pavement Cracks
Belleville Satie stirs, while breeze seeps through a window left ajar in Belleville, our home. The scent of white wine, our blood. The salt lamp kindling. Your precious orchids growing jealous Pavement Cracks I shall cast these cracks in the pavement with molten gold, so that I may hold these second
Zoos
In Memoriam R. S. Thomas I tell Genevieve Cooper about the world every Tuesday at three. She lives at the top of a hill outside of town and everyone assumes that she has some nurse up there who helps her out, but that isn’t true. She’s lived there since her husband died when she was […]
The Ballad of Mohamed Bouazizi
“The Spring of Nations, for the second time, Turned out to be melodious bel canto.” – Czesław Miłosz, A Treatise on Poetry (1957). A time of schism, scandal, shock, dreams and killing drones, a whistleblower in the west, theocrats and thrones. Panic spurred a country’s qu
The Man with the Backpack
The man with the backpack stands next to us on the train every morning pretending to read his book. We spend the seven minute journey to school trying to make him laugh or sigh, or, if we put on a really good show, glance up from his fake reading with an incredulous look. It’s an […]
Coleridge Called from Venus [Last Night’s Dream]
The yellowblue was chanting loud, And sulphurbubbled steam did scream Through all the shifting waves of mist Above an algid stream. Both dank and ocean claimed the land, When, coiling through the acrid sludge And beaming through the sullen soil Mr Worm did trudge. A SWAN came in with p
The K. of F.
The routine was simple. We board the train and the King of France gives the speech I’ve heard a hundred times: “Excuse me ladies and gentlemen I am a single father with two children / my son was hit by a drunk driver / he is in a wheelchair / I have no insurance / […]