after Suetonius
Caligula ordered the night city illuminated.
Every stoop, porch, or balcony was a stage.
He made the senators dress as prostitutes—
tight silk skirts, paste-on eyelashes.
Up to a matron to wriggle into a boy’s shorts.
Marcus Severus, one-armed veteran
of our labyrinthine border wars,
had to hobble into the amphitheater
armed with a plume and attack a lion.
A plume! We were fascinated.
We were all players, who was the audience?
How lucky I am tonight to be holding a lantern
at this railroad crossing in the middle of America
and not clinging to a leaky raft on the north Atlantic,
In 1027, not far from Bernburg,
eighteen peasants were seized
by a common delusion.
my boys & I refused to believe it was Michael who didn’t make it through the night even though the cameras strewn across the sky showed the mansion lawn specked with red sirens & from my own covers I imagined him to be simply asleep the way I slept
When the man can’t sleep, he builds
a matchstick replica of Auschwitz
in his basement, working from memory.
most people have absolutely the wrong idea of how to go about cutting a throat, the right way to do it on animals anatomically similar to humans such as dogs, sheep, veal calves and very young pigs—emphatically not on full-grown pigs
I
they have no gathering places
for taking of council nor
agreements
He said: “Straight from the horse’s mouth.”
He said that was straight from the horse’s mouth.
He said it straight from the horse’s mouth.
The bullet has almost entered the brain:
I can feel it sprint down the gunbarrel
rolling each bevel around like a hoop
I am so cold tonight. Lend me your fever
to mull my long pastures of crumbling ice.
Warm the jagged mountains in my spine
They called it a landslide as though
everything shifted and the weak
and strong alike were buried alive.