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Poetry
Loving A Woman
I was nineteen and on LSD / the only time God spoke to me. / Or, if not God, a voice so clear / and clearly not my own
November 2011As A Boy
my two favorite toys were a stuffed rabbit, / British grey and glass eyed, and a raggedy / monkey I called “Monkum” because my tongue / and throat strangled my words.
October 2011The Baby Is Clapping
Drunk on red wine and pea soup, my first husband and I will grab our wool hats, pull them over each other’s ears, and pretend we are happy Quebecois sailors home from playacting for the baby.
October 2011Good Morning, Crisis
To see the feather on the filthy mat beneath the gas pedal is infinite sadness. / No more opposite a place for a feather to be, no worse way / for it to get there than how it must have come, / on the bottom of a shoe.
September 2011Please Don’t
tell the flowers — they think / the sun loves them. / The grass is under the same / simple-minded impression / about the rain, the fog, the dew
September 2011Illumination
On those cold, clear winter mornings, I rise in the dark, and I sit / beneath a lamp with a pen and paper in a circle of light / barely bright enough for the work.
August 2011Leaning Back In My Chair, Feet Up On The Garden Table
I find nothing to do / And fall asleep under the sun / Near my wife’s peony beds.
August 2011Selected Poems
— from “On West Stark Street, in the City of Portland, in the State of Oregon,” | I tell you about your boy Jesus, / A thin man says to me one day. / Jew-boy. You people forget that. / He Jewish through and through.
July 2011The Only Empty Place
Arriving late to a party / I had almost not been asked to / and being no longer young / almost had not joined / seated by hosts I barely knew
July 2011Incontinence
The stain ran a trail down his pleated / Cords, but I didn’t quite register the fact, / And only later realized that it meant / He’d pissed himself.
June 2011
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