There’s a call centre where all the expired years are phoning people, demanding that they return what isn’t theirs. 1991 called and wants its mullet back.  It was a haircut gone awry, the barber wearing specs his grandma must have donned in ‘49. When 2005 had phoned, it wanted the reason you still need to burn CDs, lament the laptops of today no longer house that primitive feature. I’m the kettle to your pot—spooling cassettes with the end of a pencil. ’86 will ring about the

You balk at being buried beside your dad. That’s not how you rot! You start with the feet and work your way up! It began with the way you spun your metal top: Push down harder, boy! You’re doing it like a girl! Then how embarrassingly long you stayed on training wheels: I never wore a helmet! The kids across the street don't put 'em on! A daughter would have been better. She’s the prettiest girl in the world. His only critique the way you would’ve danced. Not on your soles bu

It’s that time of year the sky can’t make up its mind. You get it all in a single moment: the splash of bracing rain; the soothing of the snow before the gales; combined as splitting pellets when the air decides to drop a meager degree; then my oscillating talk— from our bond to the crash of stocks, as though they were the same, as if the elements are conjoined, a dual- headed Orthrus double the drool, its hounding for a verdict:   choosing who is chaff and who is cherished,

—a small flake of soot or other dirt Oxford English Dictionary To say my brand- new book of poems is just a magnet for the dust is an egregious understatement. It’s the maid in fishnet stockings, feathers in her hand, bending over with a twerk, whenever I enter the office. It’s the Swiffer that’s ascending to the ceiling (comprised of teasing glass)—   dander thudding upon its clarity like a lark.   It’s the Dirt Devil drafted into service— like the cavalry on horseback, fire

How you have fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! —Isaiah 14:12 It was the only way they’d stop. No one bats an eye to mar the locker of a Liam— penning I’m a faggot in their boldest Sharpie pink. But a Lucifer? It’s funny how it ceased. Striding through the hall in midnight black. Even goths  got out of your way, no one who’d dare to look you in the face. How you hooked your mom to change your name isn’t known to this very day. Some say you cast a spell, from a

for now we see obscurely through a mirror; one day face-to-face. —1 Corinthians 13:12 My glasses are eternally smudged. Where the smudges come from isn’t the subject of this poem. Even for me  that's too mundane. Everything I witness has been cloaked in puffs of fog, the whirl of the seventh veil, a belly like the dock in London Town, where the Inspector smokes his pipe, a monocle in his vest he deigns to use; but clarity will be crucial to his job.   As for me, brume is atm

Our neighbour has not said hi in 20 years; bestows the icy shoulder when we wave; boards his windows before the solstice each December; heads north  in the face of snowbirds fleeing south. We imagine he has the highway to himself, blasts A Hazy Shade of Winter in his convertible’s open air. We think he finds it refreshing; rejecting piña coladas below the palms. Perhaps his compass broke, has yet to figure why Mexico  isn’t what it used to be, mistaking Inuit for some hombre

When you called me a pea brain it was the most colossal laud you could have given. Peas are Einsteins in a shell, wise enough to swell within a pod, knowing together  they’ll survive, waving to the turnips as they ascend their soaring trellis; a height that even the cauliflower—our cerebrum’s doppelgänger— cannot fathom.   The Theravada monks are quite astonished at their savvy— their gift of rolling off a spoon no matter how mindful they may be   and they should know—   chan

This morning we’re scalding our tongues, drinking coffee right out of the pot; the stacks of cups that lean upon the plates like tilt-a-whirls. The dishes won’t wash themselves. But one time it will happen while we slumber. I envision the tongs that upended the franks hushfully turning on the tap, a spoon which stirs the Sunlight into froth; a waft of pseudo- lemon while the knives are first to leap into the bubbles, shoving the other utensils like a lout along the deck of a

Please make sure the ribs look like the beach. Not something on a platter from the Pig-Out. And the skull like that of a beast that’s been concealed in Gobi sand— for 200 million years. Our toes are all the same come supernova. A bone is a bone is a— None of us will be beautiful after the burn. The flash that brings us back to primordial soot.   Ashes cannot be ugly, can they? Tell me I won’t be monstrous. Bestrew me in the Ganges with a heap of Ryan Gosling. See if exquisite

Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. —Ruth 1:17 There are not enough words for love.  Maybe in other languages but certainly not in English— which is obviously the case since we’ve co-opted every variant of amour. Fervour  and enchantment? Riffed from Latin class. Eros  from the god of Acropolis. A thesaurus isn’t needed when you mean it. Hear it in the patience of another diaper change. I wipe although we’ve never had a baby.   Jacob waited 14 years for Rac

The phone inside my pocket doesn’t frighten me at all. The reels from Sola’s surface— its flares they say can disable our power grids, leaving us in the gloom to grope for switches. A million Sudanese are bared before me in their bones, flies which orbit their skulls like satellites. I’m now desensitized. Yesterday it was Yemen; the Palestinians and their bulldozed olive groves.   Show me a terror I haven’t seen. The Exorcist’s   spider walk. Someone who’s been bathing in the

Sooner or later the metaphors come to an end. apples & oranges fallacious as a forthright politician. The apple of my eye can be one-upped. You’re the orange of my ear. A voice much sweeter than babble. You never truly finish a McIntosh. Its core will see to that. The crunch that speaks of spit; its browning that in moments says it’s rubbish. I’ve never had a worm within a citrus. And the only thing remaining is the peel. I inhale its ambrosial waft, savour its final juices  

You say I should hang up my quill. Everyone’s grandma & her dog are posting poems. It’s not the grandmothers I’m concerned about, their odes to larks & scones— it’s these drooling sons-of-bitches; their ghazals, villanelles—to a flea-filled water dish; the couplets on their human's forlorn crocs, laced with bites & upchuck since he passed; the plop of meat from a can, its rings from tin chiselled in its jelly, like some avant piece of shit at the Guggenheim. Competition from

… they found among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons, one of which held the other in its embrace. —Victor Hugo And my poor bar-ba-loots are all getting the crummies because they have gas and no food in their tummies —Theodor Seuss Geisel   I know a man who claims to have devoured every Tolstoy in half-a-day. It took me half-a-decade to get through the fucking Lorax. Hugo, he said, was just a little tougher. Spending 13 hours to down both Hunchback  and Les Mis.   By t

The times I plop the ketchup on spaghetti I do it for you. The smack of a newborn’s bottom after birth. But it doesn’t flow like blood as Catelli would. The Smucker’s upon the leaning heap of flapjacks? Ones that swell in our skillet like pregnancy? Jam is half the cost of maple syrup. I also keep in mind the thawing trees— so they can share their sap instead with the tots of nature. I know you think I’m stingy. That the reason I’m pouring water on our daily Franken Berry is

Meh  must be the most boring word in the history of boring words. Meh  is the weary lift of a turtle’s head, knowing it’s one more false alarm amid the sirens. It’s the race of slug & sloth, celery awaiting the winner in fifteen years. It’s hour number three of your college lecture, the one about the strata, earth’s early bacterium, when you wish you’d fled the room— while the professor’s back was turned, his snap of broken chalk that froze your feet.   It’s the bland,  lukew

My window is an extra eye, one that tells my brain it isn’t raining, how gusty the gales might be, that the city has sent its crew to furrow the street, that a dog is doing its business in the hedge my neighbour planted—to keep the unwanted away. My window never blinks although it can— with a placid tug-on-blinds.   And should grit get stuck on its pupil, a splash & swipe  from a Jiffy Wipe will surely put an end to that.   But this is in truth a poem about the things we cho

We haven’t walked the park in twenty years. Marriage will do that sometimes. My knees, your hips. Your shoulder, my neck. I can no longer turn my head at the sound of the finch. Your hearing’s flown the coop— oblivious to its existence. It can’t be what it was, when both our bloods were surging  under sun. Time may not regress with our feeble tread, but maybe we’ll awaken evocation— ours as well as its.   Nestle your hand in mine— the other one, my darling , which lacks a di

they would say. Your parents could not concur on much at all, but on that they spoke as one. When your father spat it out, his squint was from your supple countenance. Once, he suggested that you strum an air guitar. Your wrists are limp enough. Bestowed a sky piano. As gay as Elton John’s. Hoping you’d start a band up in the ether, get out of his fucking sight. With mother it was worse. Catching you in your sibling’s training bra. Curiosity of a child,  it was embarrassingly