“Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X”
—after Francis Bacon Under Innocent, my father […]
Poetry
teacups
late again. scurrying off down the blackened, blackest holes. where are you, always, when I need a voice in my head. where babies are made. mother. madhatter hippie hair. the color of tits. and tongues. and that’s the sort of pink the china rubber ceilings. oh, all tan and gleaming, stuffed with liquor […]
fume
love is a rage that never quite slaughters. a murder with no body. a lighthouse sinking invisible ships. a robber with no hands. a rapist alone. love is a room […]
suicide note #10: wet condoms
Dear Blank, If I start this off by saying he takes his wet condom when he leaves then it’s more about him, less about the desire for evidence, more about trust, less about the edge of the mattress and the falling sky. less about the moment the litany turns to shatter inside the overhead […]
WHEREAS a friend
WHEREAS a friend senses what she calls cultural emptiness in a poet’s work and after a reading she feels bad for feeling bad for the poet she admits. I want to respond the same could be said for my work some sticky current of Indian emptiness I feel it not just in my poems but […]
from Vaporative
However a light may come through vaporative glass pane or dry dermis of hand winter bent I follow that light capacity that I have cup-sized capture snap-like seizure I remember small is less to forget less to carry tiny gears mini- armature I gun the spark light I blink eye blink at me […]
Ars Poetica With Vulture
Diclofenac, prescribed for gout or arthritis, wends into the poem to explain the thousands of vultures—long- & slender-billed, oriental white-backed & griffin—& owls who carrion-clean what the vultures of northern Indian skies leave on skinned cattle shot full of the drug, & I find myself speaking another poem’s tongue, saying something about rosemary […]
Strangler Fig
Tonight walks the rainforest of you, and the ecologist’s English fails the imagination between what’s beginning, just, to sleep, and what’s waking. Some bird is almost a 7-inch country song of carbon repeating ‘til dawn, a turntable in the roots with the orange-kneed tarantula. Old nightmare cleared for palm oil, the clouds fall through a […]