Tom Thompson is the author of Passenger (Four Way Books, 2018), The Pitch (Alice James Books, 2006), and Live Feed (Alice James, 2001). His poems and reviews have been published in American Letters and Commentary, Boston Review,Colorado Review, the Hat, Volt and other publications. He lives with his wife Miranda Field and their two sons in New York City.
Frost at midnight needle-points the windows above us and on every side. Is this what pins me? The windows do shake, the heat does rise from roads and the layers of roads under them. Is that the trap? I wake with words, I sleep with words, and still I cannot speak. It’s a trick of […]
Awakened in a crack, high in stone, blackened soil for sheet or sheet for soil. It doesn’t matter. Either way I was unhanded, defaced with richness. Neither minutes nor hours put me there, just height, and the inability to land. Below simply unwilling to lend my body flight. Was it your realm or not that […]
The building’s sleek airs hiss in the pipes, compressed slow as rose, the rose slows to blue spritzings of regret and who-cares-for-it-anyway—out of the single speckled valve a dual-chambered action— atomized to a fog of longing. Gentlemen, the slung spoor works for you, so use it. Never does quite condense into a body though does […]
A tendency, tired as I am, risen as I am to this wind-shaken, rooted boat of a building, high up and swaying at the point you fail to kiss me. A barking breaks out, fizzles to a siren I attend to without meaning or prospect of. Steam rattles the pipes, a caged thing creasing the […]
The water towers of New York are shivering like egg sacs. Shall we tell them to get down from there? Their hairy legs attract the wind up where they were so recklessly scattered by their mothers—those phosphorescent ones, so desperate to be shed of the past. Do you hear them? A whinge in the distance […]
The window smells of someone else’s apples. Caw comes from a raw tree, its branches bare of everything but the caw: A birdless sound not quite hungry, not quite not, occupies space like an invisible army, like the one buzzing in your breadbasket. Leaves swirl in a signature scribble. Their swishes swap nothing for air, […]
The lake is tired of always playing the mother. It gathers at the silt layer in tiny balls of algae. It wants no more of your grief and the sheets Of information you press on it. Really now, Who swirled you into such impossible patterns That a lake would surrender its claim to you? The […]