A Brief For The Defense

How to write about something poetic when I no longer think poetically? This city beats the poetry right out of you, as this count...

High cirrus like gauze, and a stern November sky. Helix of little black birds climbing the grey stained minarets of Suleymaniye. ~...

The silhouette of a girl walking in the shadows of the street lights, the homes falling apart around her, the dinners shambling along in...

I wake up to thin October light on my legs, crystalline autumn sky swimming on floor. The pigeons roosting out my window converse with my...

We carry things in life. Slowly, they wear us down. You will carry this city. It’s in your blood, the marrow of your bones, your l...

I. She is all seriousness. I call it experience , she says, her back against my headboard. Black panties and a white tank top, bare leg...

I saw you today. Which is funny, because I’m in Istanbul and we haven’t spoken in years. You were fourteen and I was eating soup for lunc...

Your boat slices quietly across the Bosporus. The half moon is pale in the sky, though it is not yet dark. Like a faded scar. Or a birth ...

That first light of summer in Philadelphia. It is a cataclysm, or a lambent catechism, or a cataract of sun. And it lingers, like a yo...

There is a term from the Renaissance. Italian in origin. Some believe Caravaggio coined it (others, Baglione). Chiaroscuro. The interpla...

For Jack Gilbert The dying poet is sitting on the roof of the chapel watching the sun work its way across the olive groves and the Me...

A band plays out in the streets of Florence. Distantly, resounding within the winter light that is so much like summer in Michigan. Thick, a...

He is in the wood when the rain starts; in the thicket of cedar and oak. The titter and prattle resounds off the creek like the morose laugh...

No traffic today, it’s winter and I am here without you. The sea grey as slate falling away off the continent, inflamed with the high phosph...

He has lied to everyone about his whereabouts. He is marooned at sea or in the desert with a small batch of sour mash whiskey, a sumptuous m...

Come home with me. He folds her hand under his like the surf of Lake Michigan tosses and rolls a stone. Softly eroding her knuckles. Come ho...

Put away the sundries of summer: cover the grill, the pool, the patio swing. Let the worms on deliquescent fruit drink and let the crickets ...

On the far perimeter of his father’s old farm he discovers an old well’s pump and faucet. He is a professor, and the land, agrestal and wild...

Her apartment has a dazzling view; the city coruscates at her feet in the east and to the west is the desert, severely black and empty as de...

I had a moment today where I felt I did not know you at all that you were a stranger to me that if you fell from my life and decomposed like...