Everything

If you read the Bible with no authority other than your love of story and your lack of “judgment” (meaning without the lust to prove yourself justified by an authority), it opens up to you like the long love between you and an old family member–like the way my heart opened up to my grandmother. [...]

Horsetails The cirrus above were horsetails running from the smoke stacks as we latched flaps and buckled coats, holding out for incredible thunderings, standing long as the mud of the dirty Susquehanna where girls lose virginity to four wheel drives and lift kits. We go on working despite our Sunday ghosts and rotisserie traditions. Here [...]

WHEN AT A CERTAIN PARTY IN NYC Wherever you’re from sucks, and wherever you grew up sucks, and everyone here lives in a converted chocolate factory or deconsecrated church without an ugly lamp or souvenir coffee cup in sight, but only carefully edited objets like the Lacanian soap dispenser in the kitchen that looks like [...]

TOWN GREEN: SOUTH ROYALTON How long has it been since I lazed on a town green? (Wistfulness, beware.) A couple of square acres set with maple and crabapple. (Sprayed, mulched, blooming impossibly early.) Two gazebos, for bandstand and romance. (Amo, amas. Gazebo, gazebae?) Starched white church with a black clock-face. (The time is what unearthly [...]

Crooked I wanted a crooked man. I panned for a crooked man. I tea spooned out trenches until I dug up my crooked man. Now I have a corner on a crooked man, a crooked house. I got crookider And crookider, out of whack. Nakeder than cheese, clothed with nakedness. Tilt and spin, I let [...]

Faggot As when a word lifts unexpectedly ________________________or implodes— you had meant to say maelstrom but now interposed between you and the open world, male storm (no one would think to give a sex to it, so were unready)—that was its arrival, _____________________________fire that didn’t act as one sheet but gathered separately as flames around [...]

Gregory Orr is famous and has won major awards. John Smith is a retired high school teacher from New Jersey who is a poet, well respected locally but unknown otherwise. Orr has blurbs from such luminaries as Albert Goldbarth, Ilya Kaminsky, and Naomi Shihab Nyef. John has blurbs from poets who have won grants and [...]