Poetry

What could the social club have done
to be chosen as the first bomb’s target?

What could the shoe shop have done
to be torched to the ground?

Last day for the Rivera mural; we can see a narrow section from over the near rail. Against a ribbon of hills and low sky one man swings a hammer, another an axe.

He tells me the first dead body 
he ever saw was not 
in a box, but 
hanging from a tree. Seventeen,

On the train to the museum, at the Embarcadero stop with my father, I start to get 
emotional. Tender as ever, having told a woman who loves me I cannot, or can no 
longer, love her.

In the occupied West Bank 
two doctors enter a prison:

one the jailer, one the jailed. 
The jailer walks in. His colleague

Yesterday, my son taught me the sign for lockdown—
different than locking a door,
or the shutdown we invented at the start
of the pandemic. Little fistfuls of locks
swept quickly between us, a sign
designed especially for school.

I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece but its title was “I’m autistic and I love you” so I really couldn’t have asked for anything better I don’t think.

You think of fin de siècle decadence: perversity, 
death, decline, and decay—the rise of the monstrous

It doesn’t feel that hard but that could be a sign 
That these are so bad; I have no sense. Thinking about keeping these up all summer feels like 
Planning a wedding:

The specific affliction of her curse? Doomed to be cared for 
only by those she holds in complete and utter contempt.