Grey-filtered morning & no one on the street
looks happy, a few unpleasantly defiant,
the sweep of catastrophe apparent.
Poetry & Fiction
The Party that Calls Us “Groomers” Passes a Law Allowing Genital Inspection of Minors without Parental Consent
Horrors that morons chose begin now.
Flag-draped walls are closing in now.
Whales sleep vertically, holding their breath.
Stars blink on. Hungry birds cry Ruin. Now
Artemis is running out of arrows.
Progress cut off like a foreskin. Now
the virus-spreading chickens have flown home
to roost. We bury the beached dolphin now.
In Yiddish, “vance” is “bedbug.” Pols twist words
like dishtowels. Empathy is sin now.
Romanticism in Ogallala
“You don’t have to die,” Segarra sings, their timbre plaintive and urgent but knowing and confident on “Alibi” – the first track on Hurray for the Riff Raff’s sublime record The Past is Still Alive from last year – open strings ringing on an acoustic guitar over roundy left-hand piano chords. “If you don’t want to die”, the line continues, a lead guitar a little trembly, a pedal-steely organ somewhere back there too, the arrangement solidly Americana but already giving so much more. “You can take it all back / In the nick of time”: the song is giving love by giving time. Giving time by creating it. Creating it for someone. These two have a history – shared secrets, track marks, New York City, “I love you very much / And all that other stuff.”
I started thinking about Keats (after a few dozen listens) in connection to the next line – “Thawing out my heart like meat” – thinking probably, for reasons that didn’t quite make sense at first, about Keats’s “burning forehead” and “parching tongue” in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where the “cold pastoral” of the vase cannot thaw like “all breathing human passion” can. Segarra: “Baby, help me understand.”
In the fields
I never told them
How I’d grown up
Out in the fields.
Walking up through the woods
Beyond the swamp with cattails
And the old willow with one
Sideways trunk,
And snapweeds,
Across the stream, then up
Prayer, 2025
Snowdrops are up
and sickly shoots of daffodil.
For the first time in all my springs
no corresponding trill in my heart.
Repeat
She was like any woman running from sudden rain,
a pretty picture, lifting to her head the cheap bouquet
she’d bought at the corner fruit store perennially
named A & J no matter who owned it. Some protection,
laughed a man running opposite. She wanted to shout
Magritte, but the rain at once came down in a clatter,
face streaming, he sprinted past her, and wit doesn’t matter
when a tree limb springs at your feet, and unable to stop,
she leaped, part of her mind absorbing knobs, green with lichen.
Trap
How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything that happens in life. — Marcus Aurelius
that was a base mob wannabe move,
a Bergin Fish & Hunt Club on 101st Avenue move,
a turncoat who forgot to wear his 80’s Ozone Park overcoat move,
a he had a deal move, a farcical mob extortion move
Collision, January 2025
(When asked if he would visit the crash site, Trump replied, “…what’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”)
The helicopter and the airplane crash.
The crash site is outside of Washington.
Who will visit?
The air is dangerous. The land.
The water.
Do they want me to go swimming?
Websites are crashing.
Who will visit?
What’s the site?
Hopes are crashing.
We see
the crash site is expanding.
Our eyes are sore.
Who will visit?
Who will see?
Do they want me to go swimming?
I am frightened.
I am crashing.
The water is rising.
The waves are crashing.
Who will visit?
Who will comfort?
Who will die?
This land is American.
This land is our land.
This land is a crash site.
The water is full of words.
The water is a crash site.
The water is American.
Water can change its name.
Words are crashing.
Will you visit?
We are living in a crash site.
I can’t swim.
THE GIRL AT THE END OF THIS BURNING WORLD
…Leada came up from L.A. to escape the fires. She talked about electromagnetic fields, the ex-Mormon guy who gave her chlamydia, pyros and tweakers, the Rothschilds, the imminent Earthquake that would destroy everything, the entire state of California. She picked Leila up in her car that smelled of old Taco Bell and vape smoke and perfume and just drove, blasting different cloud rappers she’d fucked or tried to fuck or who’d tried to fuck her, who were too ugly to fuck, etc. Talia was in the front passenger seat. They crossed the bridge, weaving manically in and out of traffic, drove through the TL, ended up at Fisherman’s Wharf on a cold, desolate night.
Urged by Evangelical Christians, The U.S. Returns to Her Rapist (January 20, 2025)
Free from the horrors of the next four years,
the quiet dead rot peacefully
beneath offerings of flowers.
Co-Existentialism
GAZA,1974
I
After dinner with the grandmother –
young wives of the household
are feeding children
and serving dessert to the men.
I am a guest, an English teacher
new to the Middle East,
without even the basic Arabic
most Israelis know
and I cannot play in pantomime –
like my daughter –
with the children and the goats.
I am placed in a bare room
with an old woman
who talks continually
as if eventually
I must understand
her native tongue
Because we are women.
How to Mourn a Famous Friend
Recoil from the headline’s slap.
Scroll through all the phases of her face.
Dig up your own photographs. Decide the auspicious number means she died without pain.
Place your favorite – arms around each other, grinning like fools – on your body where it aches the most.
Hold her pet name for you under your tongue.
First Pomegranate
Which part of this crimson
honeycomb to eat? And how? Sun
highlights the knife’s blade, stripes the room
like prison bars.
I watch you scoop seeds, then copy;
savor sweet-tart bursts
as red pearls open.
Your food soothes me, your kind,
scratched-by-smoke-and-whiskey voice.
You must meditate, Sweet Pea.
Learn to let go. You’re just like me
at that age – beautiful and charming,
far too stubborn.
Not with you.
Afterlife
…Leila, do you believe in an afterlife?, Heidi asked. Leila was on mushrooms, lying in a bed of roses. The way Heidi asked the question made her think of a spring day on a planet where it snows all the time (after the last snow on Earth). She closed her eyes. Everything passed too much like a dream. I don’t know anymore, she said, truthfully. There had been a time when she had seen certain things, known them, well after the atheism of her adolescence. But seeing, knowing, passes away too, into the void. What about you?, she asked.
Lost Ghazal
Midnight. Teens wander – beautiful, lit, lost.
A homeless man waves his torn flag. Git lost.
How close lie pleasure and oblivion.
Till Roe – missed period, dead rabbit, lost
future. The waning moon makes her wonder
about old boyfriends – cop, convict, Brit. Lost
to time or wives. Renunciates fear their
hungers. The grump toasts, Here’s to more shit lost.
The woman pulled to pieces by her kids’ and
husband’s needs. She offers kiss, toy, tit. Lost,
the free, whole self she once was.
Late October 2024
Ghouls in the bushes, bones on lawns.
Leaves reach the height of their fire
and the veil between the worlds thins
toward the only day that I am
once again my mother’s child.
Some people avoid this doom-focused revelry –
children’s faces bloody and scarred,
plastic fangs crammed in their small mouths,
spider webs and gravestones in suburban yards.
But it’s the living who can hurt us.
I’m hollow-eyed from too much news,
my family fractured,
democracy unravelling.
War Twofer
A necklace
Lost in a looted
Burnt home
In a kibbutz
Was found
Last week
In a burnt home
In Gaza