Poetry

could not know your dazzle in all its power a brilliance from inside that dark center otherwise stark gaze gleams

Only my shadow is real: upon its shoal, waves bend and break. No need to write an argument for shade –

Don’t nod, borrow or rob. Live not on evil,

Magdalena was shaping small pools of water in pockets of stone. A bare-faced ibis sounded his quintuplet alarm when you turned to me to say you’d stopped the medications one month ago. The head pain, back pain, tremors, the cytomegalovirus—too…

so that the sounds of daily living become a part of the ritual as public as private as life but also so that when I sit in the dark on the couch paying the bills my face illuminated by the…

in a woodstove. Some warmth returns to my life, some looking-after feeling, some protective force for what is tender, vulnerable and lost in me until now. What a joy

I paid my friends to step on their hands with stilettos The gift of stigmata

which was not unlike your beating heart. A city in which I was a stranger, and thought long afternoons on the beating hearts of strangers.

Tightened, cut repetitions, activated passive voice, considered where we might be locked in the wheel Put some things down there

TVs, SCANNERs, as advertised in the window, & another said SHOES: SOLES & REPAIRS & another said Passport photos & DrEAM REPAIR & another said MisC. so when it was my turn