Browse Topics
Sexual Violence
A Boy’s Girl
At fifteen I know the word molestation, but it is something done to you by strangers, not brothers who build you forts and make homemade peanut-butter cups.
October 2014The Encounter At Twenty, 1966
The day that it happened, / my teacher had written crap on the bottom of my first poem. / I wanted to throw it into the Hudson / where it would sink with its no / under the gulls, the garbage scows, and the litter.
September 2013The Tyranny Of Paradise
When I was twenty-four years old, it looked to me as if America were coming down. It was 1979, and there was runaway inflation, long lines for gasoline, a nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island. Men were curling their hair and wearing high-heeled shoes, and the Soviets were still poised to bomb us off the map.
June 2013Little Bird, Little Bird
There are four types of brick. I remember two of them: pavior and stock. Our row house was all brick with ledges near the roof, four stories up. Pigeons liked to make nests there, but it was stupid; the ledges were too shallow, and with the first strong gust of wind their nests blew down. Still, year after year, they did it. Optimists, those pigeons.
January 2013Selected Poems
— from “Wondrous” | I’m driving home from school when the radio talk / turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit / the here and now of the freeway at rush hour
August 2012The Back Door
Catching fireflies, caring for a newborn calf, hearing a slamming door for the first time
April 2011You Always Call On A Sunday
You are not ashamed. You are stunned: By this new thing that he left behind, that spread through you like blood in those hours he was with you. By how easy it is to die.
March 2010Narrow Escapes
A noodle shop in central Burma, The Phil Donahue Show, the Tet Offensive
January 2010The Maluksuk
Go-boy made a knife for his girlfriend. He called it an ulu, and I had never seen anything like it before. The ulu was an Eskimo fish-cutting knife. It was about the size and shape of the bill on a Lakers cap. When Go showed me how an ulu was used, he held its handle and carved up the air with card-dealing slashes. He said Eskimos never wasted any meat because of this knife.
September 2009