Poetry

Africanus has a million bucks, 
and still he wants and wants and wants. 

Do I have to talk about fear? 
So much has already been said 
about hidden spiders, compass needles
lodged in the soft of an eye. 

the bloodshot eye cannot swallow any more red sunset rose after sunset rose in the mouth of the field godless

Train on the rails
Moon buttonholes the sky
The sorrow, the sails
Your hand, my thigh.

Moon buttonholes the sky
Lines trail airplanes
Your hand, my thigh
Doors close again.

is fragile as speech in answer when you ask me please go light the fire in the drum

Turn out the light and I’ll explain. 
—James Fenton

It’s where I’m heading
It’s what I overheard
The lines in the corner
The flaming word.

It’s what you expected
Your greatest fear
A chip in the teacup
Bills from last year.

truth is the enemy it’s over the best part about terror is territory together we opened the border

I dream us young, again,
mother and daughter back
on 69th Street inside
our old brownstone—across
from the church, patch of lawn— 

a house neglected, wrecked,
as if the family
had been forced at gunpoint
to move away. In corners
dirt stacked like...

curbside on an Arp-like table. He’s alone
of course, in the arts district as it were, legs folded, 
swaying a foot so that his body seems to summon 
some deep immensity from all that surrounds:

Odious Chloe wrote this
  on her seven husbands’ graves: