Ginny

These are all the writings I have produced this year. They reflect a period of terrible pain and intense growth over the past 11 months. I related exactly what happened in another piece called "Hell Year." Nuanced and aesthetic they are not, but these pieces hold more value to me than anything I've written before this year. Reading through these poems, you can see when things hit the fan. The first two poems are the weakest, but they still convey some important messages and p

The Eye When you're getting over a near-death experience, the word "fear" doesn't mean anything to you anymore.  In a roundabout way, the reminder that you're vulnerable--that this great steel wall of your skin and brain is penetrable by something greater than you--makes you feel invincible. You become numb to small things, but you're paradoxically vigilant. God threw down a pair of golden glasses that cured your nearsightedness. They hit you on the head. You're told since yo

Backyard barbecue babes ephemeral like cicadas, air thick and dank with smoke. Chicago people don’t scare easy yet they tread the streets...

Ah, humanity: the headless hitchBOT on a Pennsylvania park bench.

I’m unsure what time of day it was when my headlamp started to dim. I bellowed for help in Spanish and Dutch to a vibrating echo. I knew...

I lay awake in bed late one night, frozen in the shadow of a figure in my doorway: a six-foot three amigurumi man. I made him, tediously,...

I met you on HAM radio in the 90s— you snatched a butterfly off a birch tree and showed me the powder from its wings on your amputated...

Ideally, I’d like someone anonymous I can send art that makes me laugh, like Frank O’Hara’s poem about Lana Turner collapsing. We would...

Harrowing as the day I was born (I think??), you lamented about how you briefly forgot the love of your life--like driving a small pin...

I wonder what you looked like today, the day when I erased you from my mind. It didn’t emerge from bitterness; not an eviction but a slow...

I'll wait: not like some fanged or taloned thing, but like drumlins lain regiment on cold plains, the last bullfrog rasping in the wood,...

Remember that, the week I had convinced my bloated words to elope with me in the Riviera to sit, my placid subject; wear a Turkish robe in ways I could evince them? Akimbo in marital bed, the purplest words I minced, milled to gunpowder, and a combustive flare of hostile dust and physical power scared up hard times marked by The Struggle. In time since, I'd worked to find my eupheuism, between two heavy stones, can sedimentize and crack a coarser silt that dissolves in boili

To trust the writer of tidy endings is to trust the painter of perfect faces. I’d rather follow those who explain the gridlike struc-...

An unperformable play. We open on an urban Caribbean plaza, the main square in a capital city. It is late morning. There are tourists...

there once was a springtime dill lavender blue the scene never softer in nival review the serpent, the may queen danced fate’s minuet...

some instances deserve no words and some words deserve no instance can you not see in front of you behind you and ahead? i wish i could...

in the living room, on the embroidered couch the light was dim, the only sign of death was in the air the stale fetor of yellow tail my...

el chiste es tan viejo la canción ha sido cantado otra vez las palabras dichas además de mi corazón latiendo como ojo parpadeando como...

i'm sitting at marthes's piano, my fingers gliding across the new keys.  new pianos are like new shoes--you have to break them in and get...

i used to sit on a bench, waiting for you watching the blue cranes picking up their feet watching the grass grow from the foreign soil...