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

You were five when you had spelled your family name—aloft with crow & owl— Fisher & Son, and you without a brother, though you’d wait for years for one, hoping he’d take the pressure off your shoulders, like Simon of Cyrene the cross of Christ; and it surely wouldn’t have been as bad as that: beatings till you swelled, thorns inside your toque, a hammer thumping nails into your wrists and not the barn.   Instead of evening chores, you lay upon the straw as if a manger—   the

You don’t really need to take a vow for better. Only just for worse. No one has to give an oath for richer— the jet skis, the chalets, that house on the Riviera, pouring champagne on your morning Oatie-O’s. It’s the poorer that entices you to leave; upon that shitty futon full of fleas, your stomach all a- rumble from that slice from Quickie-Mart, knowing it spun all after- noon beneath the lamp, waving to the wieners which you’ll down for lunch next day.   In health  you’ll

All of us are smitten by the cute. And the shine of symmetry. The clear, un- blemished skin of stunning’s layer. I could sing each varied note of your cantata. In its proper key. Something that’s beyond my scratchy throat. My wineless inhibition. You say the sweetest intonation was from a haggard in the alley, bottle on its side beside her feet—bare, sniffed out by a rat’s consuming hunger:   Mama take me with you. Reach down with your hands, gently tickle like you did. I rem

I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans —Claude Shannon Dr. Chandra, will I dream? —2010: The Year We Make...

It's a Jane or Johnny-come-lately, the solitary rose in my garden, a harvest holdover or belated bloom that's risen when the others have...

With your hands wrist-deep in the black of loamy soil, you tell me your infant daughter died at break of dawn, on a day our star had benignly risen,   without  a hindering cloud; and you mused that early morning, as you sadly went and found her, stiff as a Hasbro  doll, her unblinking eyes locked upon the ceiling, that to call it “sun” is a misnomer, for it’s connected to Mother  Earth, and either “u” or “o”, it says the same masculine thing. It's the female   that reproduces

The flowers in my house are a fraud, marigolds that never wither, forsythia forever fake with vibrant yellow that doesn’t fade, daisies...

I’ve never written you a love letter, as I did for the girls I crushed on in school, vowing a childish forever love. I’ve been told that...

It’s hard to believe that crotchety old man and his wife hobbling into the store where I work were once hippies. Their faces creased like...

This one is not so Grand as its river, no Seine cutting at its heart or couples arm-in-arm amid  je t’aime. We can see the eroding...

The way our cat sleeps on our books has made us appraise osmosis, her head reposed on the cover’s title, her paw outstretched over the...

On the day of your Bat Mitzvah, you twirled beneath the snow, your unpierced tongue extending like an ophidian from a cleft, trans- muted...

We discern the milky seeds of dying dandelions, afloat in mid-June breeze, and I tell you as I boy I saw them through my bedroom window,...

The cat of which I scrawl is but a menace. He doesn’t make an attempt at being cute. His purr is like a Dodge without a muffler. He will...

What is it about our conditioning that moves us to hate the weak and ugly? What stories were we told of beautiful riders and delicate...

Our daughter is dead. We plant seedlings by her grave in April, when Spring seduces with all its promise, moisten the ground with a jug...

I was finally compelled to cut my lengthy hair. Twirling it on my fork in spaghetti’s place, staining it Ragu-Red; quaffing it with my...