Stories Collection

  1. Boil it down: feet, skin, gristle, bones, vertebrae, heart muscle, boil it down, sk...
  2. 1. What is heaven but the history of color, dyes washed out of laundry, cloth and cl...
  3. Remember how we keep the back yard pinned on a stare so it doesn't wriggle away when ...
  4. Her banal, her tomfool, her carnivalesque and don't you forget it. Her Extreme Violet...
  5. were collected from the corpse found lying in a field near a small stream. From the...
  6. When the krait strikes but does not loose his venom: dry bite. What makes the snake ...
  7. "Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green." -Henry David Thoreau, A Wee...
  8. This time it's true, as much as I remember from what she told me. How she gave birth...
  9. Excitement! We in Psych Ward were frantically constructing kites for the annual Kite ...
  10. Oh monkey butter's tasty, tasty, you put it in cookies and pie, you use it in cake,...
  11. are all we see when we cross the river to this land. Two or three days, we guess, si...
  12. Just when I think I am about to be tilted on a table for death to eat-my friend arri...
  13. That sound of ice gripping the river, cold infecting things, was the sound of my gra...
  14. I find a stool so small it must be a child's and lift it for her to see. Cracked pai...
  15. God may play dice with the universe, despite Einstein's last hope, but serious gamble...
  16. Although they know no other waters and have no creation myths, the fish don't like ...
  17. Cold water mermaids, and only on Fridays, said Pope Ignace VII. Sumerian texts sugge...
  18. Death is a celestial fox that leaps out of his coffin, tonight his tail sweeps away ...
  19. translated, from the Greek, by Diskin Clay The episode of the Sirens has two stages ...
  20. Philippa woke one morning in early April to discover that her face had collapsed. Ove...
  21. (dirt stolen from an infant's grove around midnight) Do not try to take it from my c...
  22. There are mysteries-why a duck's quack doesn't echo anywhere and: Does God exist?-w...
  23. In my function as translator, I want to be as constant as Chet Baker, who blew withou...
  24. The shield that Hephaestus makes for Achilles represents a world, the world of the go...
  25. A Special APs Supplement 1. The History and Scope of English Poetry English poetry b...
  26. The front desk is staffed by a sad man with a migraine. Like prepositions, subordinat...
  27. -for Brendan Constantine it said on his report card, five years old, the boy so slu...
  28. it says on the dead author's ("the author is dead") daughter's T-shirt. He sympathi...
  29. Then we argued into the morning hours over which lasts longer-a river lagoon with a l...
  30. This evening we walked along the street of death We saw them taking away the dead in...
  31. Cut 15,000 pieces of paper into dolls Each piece of paper represents one child Now ...
  32. When the doctor told her. Most women would have said. She smoked, puffed, inhaled h...
  33. So ta-dah: here's the moment to which we've been brung-- but right off the bat, don't...
  34. Though eager to check out The Last Judgment painted on the wall behind the altar I pa...
  35. To Ken Burns My Dearest Beloved Mommy, I have only one diaper left, provisions are ...
  36. The famous Polish poet calls Simone de Beauvoir a Nazi hag but to me she will always...
  37. I don't know why I fell asleep when I was eight at the top of the stairs listening ...
  38. The most important act of a poem is to reach further than the page, so that we are aw...
  39. Zuzga drew the saddest elephant in Block 4 Karel scribbled his name upside down unde...
  40. This is a quiet grave. It is not made of myths, of great barbarous fish, of coral, or...
  41. A vulture rose and flapped across the sand, as we approached. At the lookout, others ...
  42. And meanwhile this life is like a camel walking all this way and that way while goi...
  43. In the days of heightened alarm and collective grief that followed the bombing of the...
  44. -for Starkey Flythe How contrary it is the human heart, how it's propelled by opposi...
  45. Thank god the twentieth century is over. It started great, with Yeats and Robert Fro...
  46. In memory of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Vienna 1898-Auschwitz 7944 A drawing that looke...
  47. I am the one standing in the rain, invisible beside you. I am the one in the dirt w...
  48. Needle to thread. Scythe to wheat. Foot to pedal. Hammer and sickle. Work, work, work...
  49. Somewhere a blue horse floats over a sloping roof and a kite soars away from its st...
  50. This is a guard with a stick This is a stick with a heart This is a heart with a ho...
  51. In seventeen hundred, a much hated sultan visited us twice, finally dying of headache...
  52. Something about the parade I hated-- so much gaiety on a knife edge, the captain of t...
  53. Such easy sleep. A simple eloquence. Like a sail cutting a dean incision through t...
  54. I become type on the page, Nancy Drew, girl detective, solving mysteries in a series...
  55. This is the place I began and this is the life I am in, and no more asking after tom...
  56. My father battled two fire-breathing white owls that night with his sword, though he...
  57. I The windows are normally independent of one another, although you may pass back an...
  58. for Anne Bei We continue to eat our lunch I tiny fingers we used to touch each o...
  59. The great brass bell was dragging itself across a landscape mottled with parks and cr...
  60. Literary relations, easily remarked, tend to be superficial, a showing off of the ori...
  61. Most days back then I would walk by the shrike tree, a dead hawthorn at the base of ...
  62. I found myself in a story without suspense, only one deaf falcon circling deafly, a...
  63. The tundra loves you We here in Minsk sleep blink eat and dream I'm so revved I crash...
  64. Like a dog retching up something it ought not to have eaten I remember you. JONAT...
  65. Before September 11 I would have written it one way. I would have interviewed the sol...
  66. As in that grey exurban wasteland in Gatsby When the white sky darkens over the city...
  67. It is morning in late summer. I am moving in the yard at the Church of Our Redeemer,...
  68. What is not part of the calamity goes on-- the salmon move upstream. Their colors a...
  69. The forces of the imagination from which strength is drawn have a disruptive and capr...
  70. My soul, don't look for vague immortal things, Exploit instead what your experience ...
  71. He swat down on the sidewalk in front of my home "this ground is a footprint of y...
  72. I breathe Hiroshima-- fall-out refined by the air of transcontinental drift sifted...
  73. My brother turns his life insideout, from a jail in Leesville, from a half-way hous...
  74. I lived like a god. My thin back walking out the door, my heart of mayonnaise. I pu...
  75. Patience A West Midlands poem of the Fourteenth Century Patience is a virtue, thoug...
  76. Yesterday I left things as they were although it took me most of the day to realize i...
  77. Dumbed down but handsome, a storm makes its way through the spark of power lines ...
  78. She was In the Which then Had died Her nose Told her "Between us It's Dead" Was she C...
  79. 1. Some natural tears they dropped, Especially on the 900 block of Fairchild Where...
  80. Because I open my mouth too wide Trying to take in the curtains behind us And every...
  81. Simple things like bread, you can't even think about them. The lesson of skin touchi...
  82. For many of us-scholars, biographers, translators, directors-it's a labor of love. Ar...
  83. "Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green." -Henry David Thoreau, A Wee...
  84. would it wake the drowned out of their anviled sleep-- would it slip the sun like a ...
  85. I watched him slowly cave in, inside himself, where the world knew how to take the ...
  86. I have two coffins but only one wife, who loves me like a neighbor. I have one wing...
  87. My Sister I am writing to you for the very last time. -Marie Antoinette I cannot r...
  88. Always when I glanced inwards she was there, completely naked and turned away, about...
  89. seventy destitutes and a shirt that ripped itself up in the null, by some caprice I ...
  90. A few days after the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City in Septem...
  91. My dreams are not worth a half-penny: a battery cut in two, eighty orange roses, an...
  92. Tony Piccione belongs to a tribe of people who are easily wounded, who clamber along ...
  93. In April, something started. In April, something stopped. Like an engine turned on ...
  94. Sensitive on a hillside, sensitive in a dusk, summer dusk of mown clover exhaling i...
  95. ten prose poems In the Asian galleries of the Seattle Art Museum I discover a painti...
  96. RAY GONZALEZ three poems Taste The trail of ants changed course and headed away f...
  97. seven poems translated, from the French, by William Kulik a lamp goes out with a la...
  98. When I pick up a literary magazine these days (always question the voice of someone o...
  99. The Promise Mysteriously they entered, those few minutes. Mysteriously, they left. ...
  100. After Long Silence Politeness fades, a small anchovy gleam leaving the upturned po...
  101. Not lurk, not rancor, not rage, nor, please, trapping and tearing, yet they were the...
  102. One must be right, one's truths must be true, most important of all, they, and you,...
  103. It was a pathetic treasure you held tight to your chest. Hadn't you abandoned the li...
  104. I knew this couldn't be me, knew this holy double of me would be taken from me, wou...
  105. Let me be plain with you, dear reader. I am an old-fashioned man. I like the world ...
  106. Young women in kerchiefs, terrified they will not be believed, swear they have not be...
  107. Pearly judgment radar hangs in the sky. A mapmaker's dream, the night turns cold and...
  108. "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail...
  109. In summer when it is too hot outside and there is always sweat running down the si...
  110. The usual stories are of foxes and thick-pelted wolves, but even a house rat will gn...
  111. Cupped Ear She's a good listener or so she's been told. Secrets and songs, long-m...
  112. They manufacture newsprint with a grain, So you can tear straight down a vertical co...
  113. The turtle seemed to possess the world much better than I-- I with a shotgun, my hand...
  114. They play at violence, and so do I, even I, though never would I have imagined I'd ...
  115. seven poems translated, from the French, by William Kulik disparate oceans spread the...
  116. At first it seems we're in a car-though it must be a bus or maybe a ferry or somethi...
  117. seven poems translated, from the French, by William Kulik I Leave My Sumptuous Apar...
  118. The Minor Stations When you walk so early others sleep -And doesn't nature admire t...
  119. after Ungaretti's "Veglia" Full moonlight beaming down into their putrid shellhole, ...
  120. Of Childhood the Dark Here Uncanny to realize one was here, so much came before the...
  121. Between the Material World and the World of Feeling Between the material world and t...
  122. Here's green, here's the tree of being showing the world renews itself these leav...
  123. -Hesitation Sometimes only a slowing so momentary it can scarcely be seen as if a d...
  124. ten prose poems Nothing is more remarkable in Kleist than his fierce aversion to the...
  125. seven poems translated, from the French, by William Kulik you were a star too elep...
  126. Of Childhood the Dark Even then, though surely I was a "child," which meant sense a...
  127. It turns out that Kafka always wanted to draw, "to hold fast to what was seen," as he...
  128. The owl in the trees doesn't move, its claws embedded in the branch. There is heavy ...
  129. The gash I inflict on myself in a sludge-slow brook in a dip in field of hornets and...
  130. I imagine myself in time looking back on myself-- this self, this morning, drinking...
  131. One morning in a strange bathroom a woman tries again to wash the sleep from her ey...
  132. MICHAEL FRIED ten prose poems Gisele Lestrange For several years before she died w...
  133. Conventional Wisdom Suggests The place existed somewhere. So they kept busy constru...
  134. The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the oth...
  135. TRISTAN TZARA seven poems translated, from the French, by William Kulik Raison d'E...
  136. In Boris Pasternak's Essay in Autobiography the story is briefly told of how he came ...
  137. Oriented to the stars the poet marches briskly due north on a windy night in his fift...
  138. As soon as I heard of it, I knew I was despicably, inextricably guilty of it. It wa...
  139. Ask Much, The Voice Suggested Ask much, the voice suggested, and I startled. Feelin...
  140. Diorama As Time Passing When the first flint was struck and a spark ignited the fir...
  141. TRISTAN TZARA seven poems translated, from the French, by William Kulik Circus II...
  142. "better to be lucky than to be smart"-Lawrence White When I stepped onto the platfor...
  143. The Destination I wanted something, I wanted. I could not have it. Irremedial rock ...
  144. It wasn't, as I thought at first, grounded in death, mine or any other, it was suff...
  145. Budget Carnival Instead of the bearded lady, a teenaged boy in a ball gown and a l...
  146. The rat was fat and healthy and equally surprised, almost insulted. Leaving only bec...
  147. two poems Distance is money just out of reach, a kindness like rain-laden clouds t...
  148. By a whim of the goddess they are sat together at Phedre. At first nothing happens. T...
  149. Pandora It was dear, now that the story I'd waited so long for had finally found me,...
  150. Always my awful eyes, and always the alluring forbidden, always what I'd see and th...
  151. Then seemingly all at once there was a past, of which you were more than incidentally...
  152. three poems The carved wooden baby has a mature man's face, 'a likeness, you're gu...
  153. six poems A Special Apz Supplement Here's a tin cup furred with rust. Here's a ba...
  154. Rainfall past any interrogation. Questions and answers are not the business of rain....
  155. Only the mule's reins in my hands and the old smell of water and stone make the nig...
  156. On a high hilltop one autumn afternoon, three recent arrivals-a fox, an eagle, a rabb...
  157. What can I do with these thoughts, given me as a dog is given its flock? Or perhaps...
  158. The following two pieces are excerpted from a book entitled Poetry as Survival, which...
  159. Watch out, you might fall, as that one fell, or fall ill, as he or she did, or die, ...
  160. One flew and the other vanished into the books, the great amplifier of hope needing s...
  161. "Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green. " -Henry David Thoreau, A We...
  162. The first long month, waiting and waiting, I fear I am pregnant. The second long mon...
  163. How do they know that it won't decide to turn and come this way?! my mother, at 82,...
  164. Time was never a turn-on the way it is with you. Please know I distrust poetry and e...
  165. I don't know why I loved him so much. It wasn't only because he seemed helpless, it...
  166. Each Spring, in the Crucifixion movie, it was comforting to recognize the sponge-did ...
  167. When they got here, the son was carrying the wood, and the father the fire and knife...
  168. We are hard-ass and real. We know what we do, Do what we know. People who know, kn...
  169. in the middle of the night, I made myself a bed on the floor, of oven-warmed hospita...
  170. While he told me, I looked from small thing to small thing in our room, the face of...
  171. One midnight, I got home from work and the apartment reeked of fish, boiled in oil....
  172. In a long line of long lines I turn the page of Rimbaud's Illuminations and read tw...
  173. I might or might not have to wait for the purple house across the street to sink in...
  174. 1. Self-Portrait as Persephone I tasted the white poppy of the dead and broke the p...
  175. When I would picture my death, I would be lying on my back, and my spirit would rise...
  176. Edward Taylor's poems-I think the story is by now well known-were discovered in a bou...
  177. That hour, I was most myself. I had shrugged my mother slowly off, I lay there taki...
  178. Filthy lucre, dough, lettuce, jack, folderola, wherewithal, the ready, simoleons, f...
  179. This morning I found your sonnets. They don't look like sonnets. I think you're mak...
  180. In the old days, people would have to say it. There would be a big-up to Coco Chan...
  181. At his funeral they said he was, "Never a Owner." It takes a day every day. They're...
  182. Through the course of six books of poetry, Larry Levis had written so many elegies fo...
  183. In Iceland there's no reason to mention the giant wave the ocean falls the sky a s...
  184. It's akin to Icelandic kobbi, seal, and my father could float on his back and fall ...
  185. If we stay in the jungle defying the cops it's because it is free-- not money but ...
  186. A hair appeared in the poem I was reading. I brushed it aside, resumed reading. The p...
  187. Now that it's finally a good time to be a woman, I'm a man. It must be I was a man i...
  188. Lawns scattered with ghosts, with clothes on, Ghosts who shouldn't be waving wave an...
  189. The edges blur, drunk, the heart lifts, as if, suddenly, one can swim thru pain. De...
  190. Gunslinger is an epic (or anti-epic) poem of four volumes in over zoo book pages. The...
  191. They remove themselves, one after one, leaving behind them hair ties, the yellow of ...
  192. He was in knocking range of my secrets. He had found kelp there, he nested in the c...
  193. He wakes under a canopy of ice, and dreads to swing his feet to the cold pine, unabl...
  194. Fish dragging banners behind them, Expeditions to higher elevations, Herd of white ...
  195. The body's adversaries salt the pink filet of concupiscence. When the woman desire...
  196. As the dutch of her loving held him tight on the starry quilt, they climbed silk s...
  197. Our neighbor's little yappy dog yaps all day long on their front lawn. At dusk he t...
  198. Translated, from the Turkish, by Randy Biasing and Mutlu Konuk The snow falling hard...
  199. The voice yelling in the wilderness doesn't know what year it is doesn't know how o...