Poetry
Song of the Entomologist
Now, blowflies the size of dimes appear on windows and walls, and carpenter ants eat the house inside out and send out scouts. Soon, earwigs will fall from laundry fresh off the line, and mosquitoes whine in the bedroom all night. Angleworms will tunnel in the dark, and night crawlers, quick and slick as your …
Drisheen
Call it a sheep, call it a cow, serve it with raisins and a little salt. Inflate the casing with a forearm, yours or your mother’s, blend one serum with another, commingle with the animals. The stuff inside us has a residue, something that sticks to the filter-rib, the plane tickets and palm trees, the …
German Helmet
One of the boys lugged it to the porch. One poked it. One cracked a joke. Then someone gripped the rim, patted it like a dog. And nothing happened. No yellow burst of sulfur. Yet touching what a real live Nazi once touched felt electric. One by one we overturned the neck-stunning weight on our …
Puberty, as Poem by Akhmatova
The scarcity of milk— that was me, and the queue for a new pair of shoes. I was the Russian verse of frozen feet, the worst winter in memory. I was snowfall left piled on New World Street. I was the boots that walked me black. In the year of the long freeze, other girls …
Teaching English in the Biology Lab
The sea life chart is a prop For Melville, the mounted cat A visual aid for Poe. Pigs and rabbits, unborn, sit On shelves like family photos While everybody opens Their textbooks to Dickinson And Whitman, Wharton and Crane. Tenth grade is the year for frogs Dissected, worms halved and pinned. It’s the year of …
The Body Apologizes for Almost Everything
For overriding your good sense, for tormenting you with hungers, addictions, fevers and pox, for my failure to flood at the touch of one who could have made you happier, for the lateness of the hour in which I finally gave up the egg, for the contractions (hardly God’s punishments but my own prodigious inventions, …
Swan’s Home
For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draweth nigh unto the grave. —Psalm 88 The call comes at high noon, with the sun bright on the rocks and sage, not in the dark midnight hours like Ferrell Swan always expected. On her cell from his old Ohio home, his ex-wife Rilla asks …
Blue Danube
You buy happiness with a steel wick crowbar it to an unyielding clothesline as if the curse of desolation means a loss of buffed shoes a hint of want that drives worm holes into the carefully etched wood. September comes with its thrifty tongue the fragile egg cup the fusion of school days, boxed lunches …
Knoxville, 1979
It is late spring, I am on my knees pulling peanuts out of the red dirt. I shake the thin fibrous stalks, like spider webs, and when I put them in my mouth they taste like metal. I like the scrape of them against my teeth. The hum of the lawn mower grows louder in …