Poetry

Some days are an empty bolt, flat and brown, and everything’s unfurled. If you stand out on the balcony, the wings of pigeons will tip you. My own tux is thick as

To do without the body’s basic appetite primes one’s other wants. Starving and sand-colored, a desert hides its critters, ribbed and moon- thirsty in their lairs. Named after the prayer, Joshua

They are an open window with a pink sheet for a curtain. Trying to see inside the house is like staring at the slit of a small shell— smooth pale walls. There are

I know batteries work, but have no idea how. They fit so easily in the palm, like an egg or rock with a cross and a dash at either end. The cross and

“The gospel, too, is carnival,” said the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. The carnival “was the victory of laughter over fear that most impressed medieval man,” and “[F]or the medieval parodist everything