“Gastroenterology,” by Rafael Campo
It starts with hunger. Eating with your eyes.
What else we can consume. Digest the news.
The waiting room, abjection seen in flashes.
Category Archives: Poetry
“Aubade on the 8th Floor of St. Luke’s,” by J. Estanislao Lopez
The hoopla of the morning sun interrupts
a man’s morbidity, doesn’t it?
—It has no capacity
to instruct us, whose hearts grow
irregular.
“Obit,” by Victoria Chang
After my mother died, I looked at a photo where she had moved into assisted living from the ER. Her oxygen tube in her nose, two small children standing on each side. Her hands around their hands pulled tightly to her chest, the chorus of knuckles still housed, white like stones, soon to be freed, soon to be splashing like horses.
“Eating the Pig,” by Donald Hall
By itself, isolated on this plywood,
among this puzzle of foregone possibilities,
his intact head seems to want affection.
Without knowing that I will do it,
I reach out and scratch his jaw,
and I stroke him behind his ears,
as if he might suddenly purr from his cooked head.
“The Animal,” by Soren Stockman
“If the voices I hear outside / my window cease I am kept / awake by a deeper silence / I cannot touch any more / than a woodpecker can withstand / its need for the sake of what / it receives”