“I learn lemons are the meanest fruit. Put one in your mouth and count to ten, you’ll see. To suck one is worse than the splinter your mother pulls from your hand.”
“since luminosity (mot recherché / for blond) is fleet as the frames that flicker past, / since rolled-down minds tempt clouds to burst . . .”
“Why is the world so sexy? Where do religious babies come from? Teacher, if I ever got any answers, I had to grow ’em all by myself.”
“The lure and the dare is a steep sluice / of water through bedrock— /
thirty feet in too-late-to-stop-mind”
“the oversized flower in her hair which must be the color of new apricots by now, /
the color of sunset in winter, a Tibetan monk throwing off his robe”
“I had barely burped in this world, and the man was gone. Not gone for good, mind you, not yet. No, he came back nine days later and told my mother about the two men he’d met in the desert.”
“faint as relief at finding something left // of lives held here that now vanish off”
“I poison food with my pen. You?
“I wash the poison off dead men. This is my day off.”
“When the rains came everyone was saved /
but him, because he wasn’t a boat /
a man could fit in.”
Running My Mouth