Browse Topics
Romantic Love
Wanting Things To Be Different
A relapse of Lyme disease: / fever and chills, flickers of pain. / I want to sleep all the time, and my arms ache. / I lie on the steel grate that juts over the stream.
May 2021A stolen letter, a posthumous package, a Christmas card from a stranger
February 2021
Holidays
Chinese New Year in Philadelphia, Thanksgiving in Mexico, Passover in prison
November 2020
A Very Brutal Game
A man with the right scruffed-up beard and breadth of chest swaggered into the S and M dungeon that was my place of business, and twenty minutes and one grand later had my chin — still soft with the downy fluff of teen-girl skin — held steady in one paw while the other one flew at my face so hard and fast that I ceased to exist as the same collection of matter I had been the previous instant.
October 2020
Sitting On My Mother
The scar in the turf in front of her headstone has long since healed. Her death date was blank at her funeral, reflecting our disbelief. It now reads, Sept. 11, 2010. Beside that is another blank for my father.
September 2020
Les Calanques
I think of that ancient time when the sea was cut off from the ocean, how low it sank, the way the rivers carved canyons to replenish it. Such beauty often requires a kind of devastation. Maybe the saddest landscapes are always the most beautiful.
September 2020
In The Days Wherein He Looked On Me
Thursday, sad wet morning, / reading the Gospels on my way to work. / I’d been doing that all year: waiting for the bus / on the front stoop’s top step, / making my way to the same back seat
September 2020The Other Side Of The Moon
A Tribute To Lyn Lifshin
A submission from Lifshin would often include dozens of poems about a single subject: a relationship, a memory, dancing the tango. (Dance — including ballet and ballroom — was her second great love, after writing.)
August 2020
Seaside
When James is high, he is at his most affectionate. He becomes generous with hugs. He kisses my face all over, eyelids and all. I am ashamed that I like this about his addiction.
July 2020
