Explore Poems: Tercet

I wear a flower in my lapel.
I like the sweetness of its lie in my nose.
A carnation, the fool’s flower,

its heart a wilting empire.
In late-night editing sessions,
I imagine I’m planting flowers

in the sockets of eyes. Whatever helps
me reach our rigor...

Delirium in the downtown mall today:
      Burt Reynolds! All the henna-haired girls
            sneer, while their mothers, enthralled, say,

“I saw you in this, I saw you in that–
      you were marvelous, simply...

Everywhere we went, I went
in pigtails
no one could see—

ribbon curled
by a scissor’s sharp edge,
the bumping our cars

undertook when hitting
those strips
along the interstate

meant to shake us
awake. Everywhere we went
horses bucking

their riders off,
holstered pistols
or two Frenchies

dancing in black and white
in a torn-apart
living...

A week of autumn snow, and today the sun,
the buildings fizzy with melting, the beggar
draping his sheets over the bank's homeless-spikes.

My daughter runs under the sycamore trees,
shouts look it’s still snowing, it’s still snowing,
clumps of old snow falling around her.

Who...

When I die,
bury me in the sky—
no one is fighting over it.

Children are playing soccer
with empty bomb shells
(from the sky I can see them).

A grandmother is baking
her Eid makroota and mamoul
(from the sky I can taste them).

Teens are writing love...

        The heart, it hoards—
how I know this—

The small, strangled
        shining room Keats lost
his life in—and to—

beyond the window sunlight
        arranging itself
on the Spanish Steps

while the poet watches.
        Outside, snapshots
of the tourists

& teenagers tired
        of what they don’t
know yet. What will

become of us? Ash.
        Unasking. The...

I have built a machine to visit the stars.
I have built a machine to outlast the stars.
There is a glass ball inside a copper egg.

There are dynamos and turbines, Tesla coils and magnets.
There is a boy in Brooklyn, Wisconsin
and a...

A body must remind itself
to keep living, continually,
throughout the day.

Even at night while sleeping,
proteins, either messenger, builder,
or destroyer, keeps busy

transforming itself or other substances.
Scientists call these reactions
—to change their innate structure,
dictated by DNA—cellular frustration,

a cotton-cloud nomenclature for crusade,
combat, warfare, aid,...

In other sounds
 E wants a mother
[unclear] I hear

bad. Trachea,
 trace—translate
[hiss] chase

meaning’s
 severed half-
lives for cantos.

Mine pine
 after dorsal
fins. Drafts

drown in
 throat. I’m
pssst tense

subjunctive
 unfolding
spine, needling

form’s tomb
 marrow sonata.
Tingly

E taunts bow
 fingers dawn
lightly butchers

an author
 botches cadence
mutters in violet.

I ran across the street, I didn’t know any better.
Ran out in the street, I didn’t know no better.
I just knew a woman was there, though I’d never met her.

She sat me in her parlor, distracted me with trinkets,
milky glass...

amaryllis comes in many flavors
snow sometimes slants
when will politics make improvements?

strawberry amaryllis walks right in
snarling at snowfall
saying flowers don’t abuse women

female rabbi demands ancient answers
untranslatable tablets found
there’s more knowledge in flowers

aren’t all rabbis ancient females
snow’s setting in
untranslatable strawberry soufflés, first...

Past the congested interstate, past the long lines
outside the Dorothy Day Center, past the cheering bleachers,
the steam rising from the coach’s face, the fathers straining in prayer,

past the rusting letters on the marquee, the dim lights along Main,
the couples who...

Here comes rain on our roof!
It stays just long enough
to tickle me into writing this.

It stays just long enough
for everybody to get into
a pair of PJs (silk-cotton blend)

and then goes poof! At our best
we exude awesomeness. At our best
we are...

Because it changes O’Hare to o hate,
o hate, o hate — over and over, no matter
how many times I retype it. O hate, like

an American tune, an American fable
where, yo, you can enter an o hate
bathroom, take a selfie in the mirror

cuz...

What song will they play if I don’t come home tonight?
I wished someone would write a song for me, then someone did
but it was a song berating me; it was called “Actually, Ashleigh”

and I think of the cruelty of songwriters...

I’m in charge of a cage. I know those that won’t.
I don’t mean can’t. Just won’t. There’s a roster
for Tuesdays, Fridays. Dogs to die.

The disconsolate, the abandoned, those with recurrent
symptoms, the incorrigible mutt — oh, a dozen
choices by way of reasons. Even...

A girl moaning: I don’t
understand
“Wave.”

You said, Maybe
you should try
selected whitecaps.

I saw, on a flight
to Honolulu, plane-shadow
on whitecaps.

My eye tried them.
Yours could, in its sleep.
Others needn’t think of them

as waves
but as scratches
in the furniture,

light wood under stain.
Obscurity stains almost the whole
half-globe,

hemisphere....

Say they still
tie ropes to the caskets
of immigrants they find

in the desert. That a rope
saves time should
someone come looking.

Say it was a man.
It was. There is
a boy mowing

the cemetery lawn.
He is perfect
at cutting close.

Go in. How will I know
when it’s...

Once, there was a year where every romance
    had fangs. It was hard to open up a novel
without a vampire bearing down on a young, virgin neck.

Soon, they were on the television. Later, the sidewalks.
    Teenagers. They owned...

I was so thirsty, you cracked
an egg into my mouth. I ate it
& thanked you. We were so

rich then. I imagined the moon,
a being I’d never seen, in every nail
you’d use to tack the tarp

over our heads. I confused
hens clucking...