Drimia maritime, or giant white squill, grows up to a meter tall along the rocky Mediterranean coast. It was used in ancient times to mark borders and boundaries, and as both a poison and a remedy.
Dear great white squill in my little life, how your delight
is always predicated on the death impulses of this world. Your practice
of planting heavy feet, which we can see in the movement
of your lightly scented wrists:
in such a world, it is simplicity itself to be beautiful.(More …)
The years before my grandmother’s ascent,
each week a trip, my father’s hand would steer.
Her small apartment wedged inside the steel
tenth-floor suburban tenement, intent
to be a box for those we loved to die.
I asked my father why, rebuked silence.
A plan to die, her brave gift, defiant.(More …)
I could almost say I was raised
on long unpaved roads with no street lights,
journeys from suburban malaise
to the sharp focus of trees, snow and roads.(More …)
you wake up concussed in Maine in the snow
without a Doberman Pinscher. & where
have all the cats gone & where the flock
of kids? & weren’t they more like
ghouls & specters & / or mostly just sad
& handicapped back when you lived with them (More …)
I know a lot of mountain people who’ll leave home
for maybe 24 hours like they think they’re obliged
like they think they signed a contract but must
return ASAP is my point to lie flat on the ground
to slowly rub the Kentucky Bluegrass & even the
Hairy Bittergrass no matter the season or temperature (More …)
I wake at 3 a.m. in this America,
head split with migraine, pain
like a spear. I swallow
prescriptions, sleep until noon.
I’m sweat-soaked and dreaming
strange dreams of America. (More …)
Erin is sitting on the floor
of our dorm room.
Erin with the thick red braid
and the freckles the sun had tossed
across her face. Erin who is pretty (More …)
“In every alley of the theatre loom the silhouettes of portly gentlemen in top hats who have come to take their pleasure with these skinny half-naked adolescents. They too will have learned to mime desire.”
–Germaine Greer
But what if they have come instead to make pleasure
by force? Sometimes the body flushes
when it shouldn’t. Someone says, I am going to teach you something.(More …)
At your wedding, you lifted up your dress
so I could attach your garter belt to your stockings.
My hand was shaking even though we still had
the strange intimacy of girls,
so you had to reach around and clip the belt yourself.
I failed you and the whole history of femininity.
But we lived in a time of elastic. (More …)