Female Cento

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters
Smart daffodils! They waited
As for Mohenjo Daro, it is covered in dirt,
The insistent shining of it
Like angels in the duned graveyard
A woman in the shape of a monster
The invisible cities burn in me
A monster in the shape of a woman
Marriage is lonelier than solitude
Billie Holiday’s burned voice
The gardenia her signature under that ruined face
Fact is, the invention of women under siege
I thought I was growing wings
Eschatology is a word I learned
Oh, but it is dirty
A narrow fellow in the grass
Godiva, I unpeel—














Japanese Symbol for Beauty Tattoo at the Base of a Neck

Everything I know about packing I learned from traveling:
It may be lost.

A character is a constriction
in the body.

A character is a sentence.
I can’t write about them, but I can write about them.

I can move this venture to the basement
because it’s so difficult to concentrate—

one eye fixed on the headache
the other a briefcase—

I only have to think of the sentence














Luftwaffe Cigarette

I have dreams about being underwater
and they end with Virginia Woolf
and the Luftwaffe and the forests are charcoal

and in the passive voice

I am in Brazil
and she takes her first cigarette
(in the passive voice) and says
to no one (who is asleep)

there will be time to dream when I’m dead.








       absent | 07 | next