Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of Third Voice (Tupelo Press, 2016); Ending in Planes (Noemi Press, 2014); Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun (Sheep Meadow Press, 2014) domina Un/blued, (Tupelo Press, 2013) One Girl Babylon (New Issues Press, 2003); When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering (New Issues Press, 2001), winner of the Green Rose Prize in Poetry, and Desdemona’s Fire (Lotus Press, 1999), […]
i would give up anjou pears for you, and their cousins the bosque, which are more beautiful, wrapped ochre, wrapped gold around their small deaths–wrapped securely as though they know an old friend will call, say love, say no. and this old friend, he would die for a crust of earth peeled back to reveal […]
i will not write you an elegy big-mouthed woman whose breasts hugged the microphone stand like some breadfruit dream of nippled clouds, woman whose arms winged softly into her armpits in a billowing flourish of skin’s bounty, thighs and ass enveloping the world with their musked satin, whose teeth tunneled through the closets of angels […]
as for the earth in the thick of summer, it forgets its song. the ground grows deeper everyday. the sun seeks out its furthest reaches while ants, single file, consume each word we say. what of my face do you imagine keeping? not even your eyes can resist a memory’s damp seduction, some radiant lust […]
you imagine you are made of glass. the thought does not depart from your daily life, your wisteria, out of season, the dim dogwood shedding berries, your chipped, failing, walkway to a front door that is not yours. at night, you settle into an opaque fullness. the inside of you, belongs to you. in the […]
listen to the flock of grackles praising the just softening fig, the disturbed hush brushed back by their wings, the placid spiral of their hovered beaks bleating out a black gravity, say the tree, say the fig’s altar, say the mute sugar invoking its seed, dark skin purpled from green, say a woman whose eyes […]
the fat dancers in the swimming pool have learned anything in water is beautiful and so, in unison, swell their unlikely movement, spin through atmosphere that imagines them the lightest of masses. look at their suspended stomachs bob and sway, the huge breasts find water’s slow orbit as lap currents would ripple a crane staked […]
last night my chest opened like a house swinging the front doors back on their hinges. the night found its way inside, curled into a backdrop for the heart which beat a strange and tangled rhythm. the ribs stood rigidly futile, scaffolding my failures, my muscles, my tendons, my arteries and veins, and when the […]