My Ordinary Love
I want you to know
what a simple thing it is,
what a plain, what a humdrum.
I want you to know
what a grey thing it is,
what a gritty, what a numb.
Poems
Mummies
When children ask if it’s frightening
when they come alive, I tell them yes,
of course it is, it’s absolutely terrifying
Night Vision
Our minds’ eyes can be keen. I hear
the young doctor in Gaza City tell me
through the car radio what she’s seen,
and I see, too, a man with arms snug
around a lifeless child.
Avant-Garde
A man slouches before a uni-colored canvas
with the perplexity of a stumped technician
gaping at the unremittingly blank screen
of a television. He adjusts his stance,
a double antenna, in search for reception.
Instructions for Assembling the Miracle
Go light a candle in your darkest room.
If you can’t find the candle, find the room.
If you can’t find the room, then the candle.
If you go, you know, one of them will come.
At the End of the World Is Forgetting
In the abandoned stacks of the abandoned wing of the library where abandoned books are kept—there is quiet beyond the finger-to-the-lips shush, beyond the quiet thrum of the furnace deep in the womb of this place, beyond the low hum of traffic seeping from the streets.