Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet Poems

A hot day and a woodpecker carves away
at backyard aspen, the dog's ear swiveling
like a tiny satellite dish: pinpoint,
lock on. Morning and the neighborhood
...

and I go

down into it, the hall again
(streetlights, blinds)
...

It is only the space between stars.
Only matter, falling away from itself:
...

than one, or two, or
enough that counting doesn't help:
a million poppies, a million rats.
...

Maybe there could have been
another life that led us here,
where we ended up:
...

The longer I know it, my husband says, this place,
the worse I know it is—the ruined,
the once. Paradise once (we think), and still
the hills, the bridge: some perfect gleaming headway,
...

Outside rained over the tetherballs,
but here I held the world. The joy
of getting it down, down right,
the sharp purple scent of page
...

The build-up, the accretion and you wonder
why you ever bothered, all the little objects— why not
a perfect silence, a white sheet: cool and opalescent,
...

out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord
—more like out of the middle, the soft
chewy center of here: the mailbox,
...