Chayote
Like other gourds / chayote has a sprawling habit / and should only be planted if / there is plenty of room in the / garden.
Baffler Archives: Poems
Columns
Late Style
They pile the barley in stacks and the unspoken halves / are greater. The season is an ongoing industry now . . .
Abbreviation of August
The period hasn’t been invented yet.
Scribes in Greece went back the
opposite direction reaching the end
as a tiller would at the end of each
furrow, weaving across the tablet
until it or the thought was used up.
Poems referred in all directions.
What caused us to stop. ...
American Sonnet For My Past And Future Assassin
It feels sadder when a black person says Nigga
Because it sounds like Nigger. It feels sadder
When a brother or sister says Nigga because
It sounds like Nigger. I have never heard either
Word in the mouth of my mother or father.
Once I had a lover who said neither word
Out loud. ...
American Sonnet For My Past And Future Assassin
When walking hope is a swagger
When sleeping hope is a lullaby
When breathing hope is oxygen
When drunk hope is liquor
When dirty hope is water
When unfilled hope is a well
When unwell hope is medicine
When impatient hope is patience
When lonely hope is company
When poor hope is ...
Bath I (Cairo)
It rained every day.
Cairo was rib-dry, glass-eye-dry
but every night in my dreams we drowned.
The bathtub was stone. Set in the middle of
a tile floor. Verdigris. Verdant. Moss in the cracks.
Ancient pharaohs bathed with less abandon
than you. Head back. Wet throat.
Skin to ...
Pentecost
Looked up and saw on a telephone wire the most unbelievably beautiful black crow in East Oakland’s history. It held a single perfect Dorito chip in its beak. If I ever get a tramp stamp tattoo, it will be of this blessed triangulation. It will be of this holy trinity being ...
You Said the Lambs Were Ready
Aim behind the ear. Point blank is a mercy.
If this were sacred, we’d let it run freely as it dies.
But we are part-time believers and tie the legs. I fold
your recipe for mint jelly into the crane’s blue paper.
A group of geese is only a gaggle on the ground.
In ...
Love Actually
When mumblecore makes it to television, I will understand it better
Nope
As for yes I’ve been against it since ballet & I refused to leap like a little white flag
A Dispatch from the Last Stout Elm in Chatham’s Fair Mount Cemetery (N.J.)
Here, too, a tablespoon of light spills from each temporary star—
Argument
Don’t tell me that I have a problem. I am the problem.