Saturday, January 30, 2016

t(his), (he)re


t(h(is)) (which is ours)
here (ours,(he)re now)
t(his) h(ere) (you, pre(sent)
t(here) (my (fu)ture is (y)ours

Friday, January 29, 2016

MY VRONSKY



He told me, repeatedly, that
people considered him
the most intelligent person
they’d met; that he was not
more successful was a conspiracy
of minorities, lesbians, blacks, and gays,
and a coterie of cliques
that sucked up all the grants.
He visits me; his handsome features,
now marred by fat, peer at me.
“What are you reading?” he asks.
(A hundred pages a day, to live.)
He is an expert on Nabokov,
international relations, modern art
David Foster Wallace, Heidegger,
and the poets I translate.
(And yet he never understood Karenina,
any more than Nabokov did,
as they focused on the crevices
in her carriage train,
in that foreshadowed bier,
but not on the abortions,
nor the Vronsky of her death.)

Before him,
I remember feeling beautiful,
and those times people said
I was the smartest woman they knew.

"My Vronsky" appeared in the St. Petersburg Review

Thursday, January 28, 2016

PERSONAL



I want to know
what makes you
tick.

I want to know
what makes you
fickle; I want to know
what makes you stick.

Tell me

which ion propels you
which soothsayer spells you
which folksinger trills you
which hardwood distills you
which downward dog twists you
which protest resists you
which neural net fires you
which siren desires you

which villennelle sings you
which jailbreaker springs you
which Uncle Sam wants you
which calculus daunts you
which lullaby lulls you
which confidence gulls you
which apple you’ll bite from
which hither you’ll welcome

what
makes
me
 
forget the right answers
consult necromancers
allow the forbidden
ignore the guilt ridden
unlearn all the learning
embrace this new burning

to know
what
makes you
tick.

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