poems from new manuscript
Boar, whose flesh makes a delectable sauce for papardelle, whose long teeth could crunch a human hand but whose temper is kept in check rooting truffles under oak trees. After 300 years wild boar are breeding again in the British countryside. Bones: the human body and the pig’s both contain 208, more or less, human extras usually lodged in the hand (phallanges) or the foot (tarsals), while the pig’s vertebrae can fuse to ribs, making counting problematic. Remember your fetal pig in high school, its veins and arteries pumped full of red and blue plastic, formaldehyde lingering under your fingernails? Pigs make intelligent (and demanding) pets, although obesity can be a problem. The Devil is often shown with a cloven foot. The herd of swine and devils perished in the waters. The sowe freten the child right in the cradel. A boar’s dark bristles make an excellent hairbrush, picking up dust better than plastic, scratching the scalp the way the pig itself might enjoy its chin scratched. My recipe for deviled ham would make you weep. Beelzebub=Lord of the Flies=Satan’s right-hand-man=Demon of Gluttony. Francis Bacon wrote prose clean as bones. His descendant painted men to look like pigs.
published in POOL
essay, to try, from exagiare, to weigh out, examine
I was eleven and watching the Galloping Gourmet with his British-Australian accent and his glass of wine
learning how to get juice out of a lemon by rolling it hard on the counter
when the doorbell rang
my hair around cans to make it straight
the man next door, his receding hair combed back
erminea, the weasel whose fur turns from brown to white in winter
asked if anyone else were home
I said no
edentate, lacking teeth
asked if he could come in
electric, from Greek, elektron, amber, because it produces sparks when rubbed
I said no, I’m sorry
euphemism, to speak with good words
we stood eye to eye
eutrophic: a body of water with so much mineral & organic matter the oxygen is reduced
until I slowly shut the door in his face
Eve, from Hebrew, living
pushing with both hands
Published in Prairie
Schooner
Firethorn: a trope for
Fucking, which people talk entirely too much about, the
Flurry of phonemes a substitute,
Foucault would say. I’m beginning to be
Free of it.
Feldenkrais makes me blush, how much it mattered. I’d rather swim than
Fornicate. Laura asks, how often? It depends what you mean by sex, I say. I never
Fetishized, was never caught in
Flagrante delicto.
Forget the times I’d pull to the side of the road
For some, heating up at 30
Farenheit outside. It’s a
Falcon honing in on a nest of mice, a venomous
Fang, a
Farce in Braille and Esperanto. And
Freud, was he ever wrong! About inversion, envy, and hysteria. O
Faucet I’ve turned to a trickle, o
Fracas muffled in silk, I don’t give a
Fig—your furor and fuss have
passed, o bittersweet.
Published in Beloit
Poetry Journal
offer haggis or humble pie. Our bed
floats on hocus-pocus (our corpore
wholly habeas) while the kitchen hums
a hymn, Hail to Higgledy-Piggledly.
If the world can’t find our hurly burly hunky
dory, let it hara kiri if it dares.
Published in POOL
N
No, non, nein, na, no, nah, näo, nee, ne, nei, nil, no, no, nu, nope, nej, nyet, nnyaa, no, non, nay, never, nei, nie, nope, nou, negative, nenni, not on your life, nå, no, no, no…
Published in Prairie
Schooner
O
O say can you see?
oil: 20 million barrels daily, half imported
not soluble in water, as in crude & ocean don’t mix
one-quarter of the world’s consumption, not
to be confused with zero or oh or
ortho, Greek, straight or correct
when the rockets give way
to petroleum (from rock), under the surface of the earth
oil: once from olive, to gain sudden wealth, to bribe, to make easy
our proud oasis (ouahe, Coptic, dwelling area)
a direct address to God, the mouth open in astonishment
our flammable last gleaming
Published in POOL
P
Peccadillo.
The animal I touched at age four, the animal I didn’t recognize to be a rat. I
commit them every day. I am not the Pope, love like garlic emanating from my
pores. Who would keep a pangolin for a pet? The pink fairy pichiciego dies in
captivity. The serpent Python fell only after a thousand silver arrows from Apollo’s
bow, whose prowess changed
Published in The Gettysburg Review
Q
A Phoenician letter the Greeks discarded, having no use in their language for a Semitic sound. If the soul has a qualm, the body shows it. The body queries what it means to be true. Quilty! Humbert’s doppelgänger—a sack of feathers? Another name for the quill of a feather is calamus, from Greek, kalamos, reed. Who first filled a quill? The Phoenician Q meant qoph, monkey, its tail lingering in the language. I propose introducing some English words that use Q, but not U, naming new conditions that will kill Scrabble players, among others: qib, the eye disorder that results from staring too long at a computer screen; qell, the nausea that accompanies the mixing of incompatible therapeutic drugs; and qatch, the moment before the articulation of a sound, that split second when the brain tells the throat and tongue to speak.
Published in The Gettysburg Review
Š
at the room of a sleeping child, a finger to the threshold
teeth drawn together
hissing softened by lips
echoed in the cave
little roof (strešica)
difference between a chocolatier (Kraš) and lime-
stone (kras), white rocks
struck by moon
as in sugar
which can be made from beets, cane, corn, maple, fruit, milk, and blood
its sweetness rhymes with bees
we say one thing is not another thing
and in this language every letter is pronounced
cup gathering a drop of sound
dusty taste of the water
filmed skin after walking in the river
sound the residue of letters
I’d like a letter that splinters
language from its parents to build
a house of sticks overlooking the sea, letting waves
instruct me—air
rushing through my teeth is also air
that could have passed through the tailpipe of a bus
I want happiness without a hole in it, the heroine says,
and the reader knows she’s doomed to a life of fissures
subterranean, so deep you can live in them, deeper than the highest
mountains are high, stalactites forming overhead
gypsum flowers like wallpaper
in such darkness the pale pink
olm, his degenerated eyes covered
by skin, can live to a hundred
wan cousin of the newt or salamander
finds his way via smell
even Proteus, shepherd of the sea’s flocks, cannot
protect him from polluted groundwater
and his own rarity
he lives only in one place on earth
a place where š is uttered
and might, if things were different, be
a dragon in the ocean’s waving
fricative, or at least a snake with a crown
none poisonous in this quiet country
Slovenia
Published in the Denver
Quarterly
T
Ursula is sure hybrids are sterile, like mules. I say
ligers and tigons, those spotted and striped hybrid cats,
aren’t healthy, and they’re confused about whether to hunt alone
or in packs, but they can breed. We’re arguing in a restaurant
in
couscous is semolina, just bigger, although I don’t know
what constitutes a species, whether Australopithecus
is the same as Cro Magnon. Each of us thinking, boy, I’m glad
I’m not married to her. Is our quarrel scientific—
she wants things fixed, I like them open? Or about names
and groups—the threshold of language? Faith exists in a world
where every day someone’s painting quail heads black or cloning
a baby. Why argue if there’s no money or land at stake,
is it just talk? The city’s Austro-Hungarian
and Italian, Alpine and Mediterranean,
with a beach that separates men and women by
an eight foot wall built into the sea. Ursula photographed
me among the half-naked bodies, ridiculous in my
sunhat and shorts. Yet I’m invisible to the women,
like a pigeon I don’t count, and neither do they, to me.
Eighty years ago, James Joyce and Italo Svevo—
Irishman and Italian-Austrian Jew—did they debate
someone always speaking a foreign tongue? Ursula’s from
American. The German for hybrid and sterile is close
to English—it’s fertile that won’t come to me. Mule is esel,
jackass. That beach suggests a different century, not
lesbian monkeys and the error of the gametic
binary, but categories crisp as breadsticks. Maybe
lions and tigers shouldn’t be bred. Ursula and I
are crow and jay, squawking at each other from across
the table. Taxonomy, from taxis, order, not from tax,
tangere, touch.
veritas: not behind the veil of sky
but the moving veil itself
fox and its ears hanging upside down
virus carried say by civet cats from animal to human
and back in the form of vaccines
Van Dyck moved from
to
some melancholy elegance intact
his royal subject later deposed by the very principle
that permits a husband to divorce a wife
permits a country to divorce its rulers
beheading merely a cruel flourish
and verse, from vertere, to turn
two fingers spread as a sign
or digits severed at the joints
any search for abiding truth doomed
as a beautiful city built on water
viewed through windows on the way to the dungeon
Published in Prairie
Schooner
Y
1. Dispensible in sound, a substitute.
2. In
1878 a silvery metal was discovered in a feldspar quarry in the
3. I
have never visited
4. How lovely to curl up with a book when the weather turns bad.
5. 43%
of adult women in
6. In
7. 80%
of American women my age work (outside the home, as they say), compared to 94% in
8. Barley fields. Sugar beet plants. Saab and Volvo factories.
9. Tomas Transtőmer sitting down to play—what was it, Haydn?
10.
11. Speech is irreversible.
12. Rare, soft, malleable and ductile, ytterbium metal has possible use in improving the grain refinement, strength, and other properties of stainless steel.
13. No use getting excited unless it’s a sure
thing.
14. The life
expectancy in
15. My friend died of liver failure, from hepatitis, from a blood transfusion in college.
16. 1953-1989.
17. Her father, an army officer, would not let her sue the army hospital.
18. She played the bass in a blues group in the Village.
19. The other players old, black men.
20. In every language the question comes first.
21. She could have disobeyed him.
22. nevertheless and despite this up to the present time at some future time besides in addition for the present now up to a specified time still thus far eventually in the time remaining even still more
23. She was the first of my friends to use cocaine.
24. We can’t all be Bolsheviks, someone said to me at one of her parties.
25. She was a
steelworker at Exxon in
26. She was raped. In whose memory does this matter?
27. The yin is passive, representing moon and shade, the female.
28. In the last two years of her life she tried to get pregnant.
29. In a signature the tail, the almost ending, the sensual lower zone.
30. The diminutive: Jane-y.
31. She was ashamed of being well read.
Published in Puerto del
Sol
Z
Praise the striped skin of the wild ass for circling eternity.
Praise the seventeen year cicadas of 1987 and 2004 and 2021 and....
Let men and women of the world sleep in noiseless peace.
Let them purple their teeth on this wine.
Let them leave sober and in high spirits.
Let coyotes find enough to eat without cats.
Let these weevils chew cheatgrass.
Let the west wind blow away small and despised worries.
Praise the stars and whoever can call any by name.
Let no one’s idea of God extinguish that of someone else.
Blame the prophets for instilling apocalyptic fervor in human hearts.
Praise the ability to open and close and open and close….
Let women roam where they like.
Praise the hills where ideas of God melt like wax.
Let inflated machines be held aloft by the color blue.
Let the hooves of deer disperse seeds over barren earth.
Let the voices of many be heard over the noise.
Expect nothing. Neither blame nor praise.
Zebra Zillion Zzzz’s Zinfandel
Zeugma Zoophagus Zyzzyva Zephyr Zillion Zarasthustra Zoroaster Zechariah Zipper Zenana Zion Zeppelin Zoochore Zillion
Zoë Zero