The first thing I feel is the hair on my stomach dancing under my moving fingertips leading downward to the raised mound of my crotch. Half-sleeping half-waking I could be dreaming. I could pretend this vegetable tube the dimpled sack of balls are foreign to the land between my thighs. I could wish for the … Read more

if someone comes to you with the truth run brush with baking soda drink vodka straight kick low punch high floss floss floss find a job you don’t hate to deter a bully saw stickball bat in half hide in bushes flash attack mercilessly don’t worry pray same shit go to prom escort homeliest girl … Read more

like this: we walked downstream   with water like cold breath in our boots   and the salmon around us throwing, fighting up   to drop their nets of marbles, clementine,   go dead and wash down, all flesh,   and we meet this way so often—   forgetting physics and improbabilities,   prayers for … Read more

Plague city shut its gates to keep out or keep in   the dead magistrate bricked up in the portal   all the living pounding gavels to keep away the Devil   the operatic chaos of the chorus typical of the times Richard Carr’s writing has appeared in Poetry East, Exquisite Corpse, New Letters, Painted … Read more

Approaching the Tappan Zee Bridge I see a green highway sign reading “Life is Worth Living” with a phone number below. I ask my husband, “Do you think a lot of people jump off the bridge attempting suicide?” At first he says, “Probably,” which leads to, “I don’t know; it’s not that high above the … Read more

I. Our pastor talks about cherubim on Easter Sunday. Cherubim, you say, like little angel babies, like cupid with his arrows, like paintings by Michaelangelo. When we look it up, we find out that cherubim guard the gates of Eden, protecting paradise from you and me. II. The condom breaks. Thin latex stretches, shatters statistics: … Read more

We sit on the tablecloth, junebug green with splotches of white daisies or wildflowers or tulips, indistinguishable in the dark of the icebox night, the sky injected with dim clouds in the spaces where stars should be. There are no more seats at the picnic tables that speck the side yard of the coffee shop. … Read more

Now that you’re gone, I sleep in the middle of the bed, my head swallowed by the crease where the pillows meet. I eat the whole dessert, or none at all, ignore the buy-one-get-one-free deal on Publix ice cream when I go to pick up dinner for one. Now that you’re gone, I use your … Read more

We fall asleep with our foreheads pressed together, the way our palms should be. Maybe this is how we’re so much the same, how our thoughts twine and twist, loop together like the shoelaces I fumbled with when I was six years old. Each time our tongues are wrapped I wonder why my words don’t … Read more

for June You start in the usual way, centered, earth spinning on the wheel. You have to consider volume, the space required to contain or embrace—as you so often have— the beloved body, reduced in the kiln, vitrifying memory and affection in the glaze, hardening the walls your hands draw up from clay as they … Read more

in Kerry Cannon’s basement, his cut-up-glow-paper walls surrounding us with so many smug stars and planets, while the Friends of Distinction slow-sung “Going in Circles” to emphasize the irony: I a freshman at Cathedral Prep in a dark room recognizing no priesthood beyond what I might sanctify by pressing Sylvia’s present willingness tight through me, … Read more

I called back my thanks, still focused on the fish I had pulled out by putting my hand inside its mouth, where what passes for teeth in trout conspired with my pink and silver treble-hooked spoon to complicate my rushing joy for one that had not gotten away. In my haste to show my son, … Read more