—Damien Hirst; Tiger shark, glass, steel, 5% formaldehyde solution; 1991 What we did not expect to find were my father’ssecret poems, saved deep in his computer’s memory.Writing, he wrote, is like painting a picturein someone else’s mind. He develope

There is a mark on the retinaI’m told I must watch, twice the optic nerve. I blink& see the dark side of a moon dissolving into the worldits shadow obscures, a dead star. If I close the lid the moon burnsbrighter, flipped now, as if lit from beyond,

Editor Elizabeth Scanlon Business Manager Mike Duffy Editorial Assistants Thalia Geiger Hannah Gellman General Counsel Dennis J. Brennan, Esq. Contributing Editors Christopher Buckley, Deborah Burnham, George Economou, Jan Freeman, Leonard Gontarek,

I was trying to look a little less like myselfand more like other humans, humans who belonged, so I put on a skort.Purchased in another life, when I had a husband and wrote thank-you notes and held dinner parties,the skort even had its own little poc

≈ The smoke never appears in family pictures. The smoke got up this morning and ran a marathon. She came in first inher age group without trying. The smoke’s children are fine, just where they should be on the growthchart. She lets their father cut t

Let’s start with something that really happened. I was at a production of Bertold Brecht’s A Man’s a Man at a small theater in the East Village. During the first act, one of the actors ran off stage, followed by screaming, followed by a voice over th

Sunday mornings I watch people at the gas station, off the highway,fill their cars on the way to the beach, or the game, or to whateverwholesome activity one shepherds their upstanding family.I wouldn’t know. The last time I went to the beach was 13

Easy has felt easier. As I runpast this relic railroad terminal,my heart chugga-chuggas,months after a mystery infectionlanded me in Lancaster General,where I learned the meaningof “pulmonary and pericardialeffusions.” These are ruinsof the heart tha

for Kelly Caldwell (1988–2020) In my next life[since thisone burnedto ashthat nightwhen you shookyourselfout ofthe worldyour touchnow memoryan eyelashon the sinkyour foundationand blushstill behindthe mirror] I live in a trance, in a transformed vall

Like a thousand-pound Pembroke Welsh Corgiheavy as four baby elephants. The sizeof a small car; or the size of a bridge. As big as a bus, or the size of a house. As bigas 90 elephants. The size of an Olympicswimming pool, with the width of an airfiel

I dreamed I heard somebodySinging in the outhouse—Frank Stanford, “The Singing Knives” Growing up in the Virginia woods we deprecatingly referred to as “the sticks,” one of my friends had a genuine outhouse in their backyard. Their old farmhouse had

I went for a walk with a girl I hardly knewwhen I was a boy on a trail by a riverfor a film I didn’t know was being madeby a director I couldn’t see or hearbehind his hidden camera in the cloudsand trees as we recited our linesunwittingly with no ide

Life is a series of decisions to move this poster to another room; that ass to some other chair.There isn’t really much to it, and then we’re done for. There was a time I wrote, seriously, about grief. I wonder whyI can’t do that anymore. Maybe it’s

Light and I “met,” if we can call it that, when we were both taking part in Lambda Literary’s virtual 2021 Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. I don’t know that I had prepared myself for the strangeness of a poetry workshop via Zoom, and ulti

My kid pats telephone poles, says twee,climbs bricks to skip in moss, & theysurrender to airplane awe but notto pouring rain. Puddle-kicker, theyname all colors green, then yay-yo,shake wet curls no when I wavetoward our apartment a half-blockof croo

The monk told my recently divorced friend that no woman would everfuck him again if he kept carrying around that bag that looked like a pursewe laughed wondered if murse was the proper term for this cross betweena satchel and a pouch we’re both poets

months and months, onceon a sofa I’d seen under a tree, driving homefrom Vermont, it wasn’t the sofa made me think of heartachethe disposing of something important, it was the suddenness of any thought and then once you’ve had it. I could probably re

Love is the Mariana Trench.Fatherhood is the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Gravitron, the Scrambler.Motherhood is the honeysuckle and the havoc.Childhood is the mansion we haunt.Love is the way we detonate each day.Tuesday is sacrosanct and snarl—its pollen guss

Supposedly there was this guy Cornellwho wanted to vindicate nostalgiaas a feeling and hammered togethersmall boxes in which he’d place aluminumflowers magazine clippingsand pics of girls in ballerina posesplus odd trinkets he’d foundon the street th

The nighttime is the right time to be with the one you love, says Ray,but according to Hamlet, it’s when “churchyards yawn and hell itselfbreathes out contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,”says Hamlet, “and do such bitter business as

Mark Rothko was just too trustingwhen he announced I’M INTERESTED ONLYIN EXPRESSING BASIC HUMANEMOTIONS—TRAGEDY, ECSTASY, DOOM,AND SO ON. Personally, I couldn’t beginto fill in what the other ones are.Is one of them the feeling of overlyenjoying the

I would have loved a canapé—pinkyup—should he have offered it to me—is an example of the Austenian subjunctive— which I have much rehearsed—its coycurtsy—to feign that I abide failuremore graceful than I’ve done— so when he plumbed my tonguewith two

My daughter is eight & alreadyworried she won’t find someone to marryor, more precisely, someone who will want to marry her—already the notion of marriage arrives an exclusionary prize.Though I say It doesn’t work that way she seems unconvincedthat l

One characteristic element of a sonnet is the turn, or to use the Italian word, volta. The typical definition holds that: In a sonnet, the volta is the turn of thought or argument: in Petrarchan or Italian sonnets it occurs between the octave and the

You make light of me. You do what Scriabin didto the sea. You make merry in order to score what you adore. The savior said of his mortalenemy—Behold, I see Satan fallingfrom heaven like lightning. Lucifer was the first winged thing to fall. You make

Salt will not sustain us. The coral petrified itself. Sappho whispered in an empty room. The ponderosa pine grew two meters that year. Only lace survived the fires. The markets were invaded by fireflies. Black amethyst appeared in wine barrels. Scorp

Books Water Look Away by Bob Hicok Copper Canyon, 2023 112 pp., $18.00 (paperback) In Bob Hicok’s 2023 poetry collection, Water Look Away, the poet does anything but. The collection opens with “Welcome Home,” in which a husband finds his wife in the

your right knee is a haunted staircase.your left is a spring breaking island. your knee is a movingsnowplow. your kneecap is a mona lisa fridge magnet. your knee linkageunlike a shrimp tail. your leg skin is an ice-raychinese lattice design. recursiv

Overhearing an argument, something beneathmy cheeks like heat, like cowbells.I am at my most probable, most liquid,suddenly. I come when called. Over dinner, a man, melting, sells American pillowsthrough the television. The napkins are of a thick pap

I wake from a dreamin which I’m speaking coarselyto my daughter who has taken offher clothes in the middleschool parking lot and is washingher body in ritual preparationto go onto the internet and find outif the rumor she heard abouther favorite YouT