Poor Claudia published poetry, prose and conversations online and in print from 2009 to 2018.

Print Archive

The Second Body

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Prosthesis

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The Cold

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The Fundaments

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Hymn To Life

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Backchannel

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Ideal Machine

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24 Hours

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All Talk

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Strange Tarot

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Mala

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Hive Mind

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The Soft War

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The Holy Grail

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Motel Diary

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Boyfriend Mountain

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The Three Einsteins

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Family Album

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Aorta

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Believers

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Nature Machine

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Celebrity Dream Poems

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Sirenomelia

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book of southern and water

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Great Poem of Desire

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20 Paintings by Laura Owens

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Kings

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Poor Claudia Five

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Poor Claudia Four

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A Voluptuous Dream During an Eclipse

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mu (Dream) so (Window)

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Don't Let Me Forget to Feed the Sharks

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That Which Gets Tired and Then Kind

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Success Window

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Digital Macramé / On Happier Lawns

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Poor Claudia Three

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Frances

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Little Blind Thing

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Poor Claudia Two

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Bucket Book

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Poor Claudia One

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Poum Poum Tra LaLa

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Online Archive

Six Poems

jealous tourists burn to enter her narrow heart or hole / men dressed as men are genius own / the daylight on their face

Three Poems

The rain drops from the sky, sonorous, pushing // bullet-shape impressions into the sand, he scrambles up the face of the dune.

Five Poems

I am thinking over everything I thought / I believed. Its small particles, / its vast rooms of exquisite but broken pieces.

Three Poems

her war so that we / could grieve easy / and decontextualized, the injury soft

Two Poems

I saw / him in the same way I saw the museum. Displayed inside glass: / a man who lived to be dead. For five / thousand years snow was / gentlesweet, preserving him as skin & tufts once-was-hair.

A Story Casts for Small Light

The wall held the drips, where silence stood, / where she's going. Pray for rain / if you go.

Four Poems

I did not want to / go / we followed / a mile / finally we arrived / to see

Eight Poems

when Missouri prisms up the glass / like the clear pink yes of Sunday morning: / I’ll exit.

Six Poems

A spider the size of a baseball, just in time for opening day, more or less as poisonous as the mine’s boarded-up air.

Circling Home

Longing to go home, we balance freedoms in still-soft palms, swaddle guns like babies, and carry them close to our chests as we march in the bone-splitting cold. Heading straight as the crow, we invite history to circle round.

Five Poems

outline of a head or of a seated figure with a child / is covering what it opens around. Here, someone said, / please take this.

Five Poems

The author’s hand in the scene. // Another metaphor for faith // foreshadowed in the decision // to insure or not insure in case // it will burn. It isn’t a nice house // but a university of suffering.

Six Poems

Some days I relax / in the most beautiful zone and hope / to be struck down, to be disappeared / by an unexpected special attack, but erasure / can't be summoned so easily.

To Shower After Four Days

You think // we must be going crazy as a people. / To wash off all this blood, whose hues // we cannot name but near pastel, falsetto, / there, our own two hands.

Two Poems

as our pure stone gains a weak door / as this weak servant alters this lesser frame / as a double frame gains this wounded roof / as this lesser roof counts thy mighty frame

Five Poems

pick up an orange and press // the skin, feeling for strings where they // shouldn’t be. Open the door // Some ancient instrument // washes your floor.

Real Life

Your arm is around his torso. Your torsos are against a tree. Pan circles this question in a book he’s reading about emotional disease. You sit on a volcano. Beneath you is a village, behind that a sunset. He crushes clover in his fist like a jaw eats a salad.

Predynastic

explosives / strapped to a bridge, / a poorly / trained militia, / a palace / stripped to the level / of jail, / the Euphrates’ / leisurely descent / to desert.

after autocorrect said losing my boyfriend = losing my life raft

Peek / in the cupboard, they’re / huddled in situ: a small herd / of grins. It’s almost enough / to make me forget / the history of my desire.

Spin Glass

You won’t look. You just hold your breath at the end of the driveway, complain about the heat. The coyotes pick at our garbage bins every night. I hear their paws on the asphalt, their breath at the threshold.

Three Poems

stormwater sags the walls as the ghost spin blossoms berries of ro in her daughter's daughter's brains the girl doublebled shares a heart with the pines

Seven poems

the tide is out / like mine / I build a sand castle / I learn from the muscles / I drip dry / I write about the ocean / and when I am faced by it / I am a humble animal / this untamed body / I have come from

Sheep Machine (One)

Five Poems

There are dreams here / that I forgot to mention. // The same dreams I’ve had / before. The slow crank // of a wind-up toy, pretty / little thing. A mother calls // her son from a distance. / A marble is dropped // in a porcelain sink.

Five Poems

Loot that holds / at the bottom of conversation. / “How do you ail?” I say. / I store old photos in a public place. / I speak an old style I got from / a book. Once it was given to me twice. / I don’t feel until you’ve started / speaking, how do you do? / Don’t ask, but answer.

Five Poems

Everything does weep, but oh / how it growls, when the wailing is done. / If anger, on the other side of fear, / is rage, this city was delivered to / death, with savage conviction.

Diver, Dive into Me

the sex there's space for something like / forgiveness maybe like with that fifty so / mething man those nights were my way of / shitting out the shame in my life even if

Constant Weepings

If I have to bathe this man that i loathe. / Bathe him, who has hurt my child, gently, and then give him / small sips from a glass of milk, comb his wet hair down... and all / the while the sounds of her screaming are broadcast through the / bathroom.

Three Poems

With machete in hand, hack open the belly / of a pregnant cow. With placenta shriveled, / you crawl inside. It’s winter. There is no more light.

Refugee Abecedarian

Feathery fumes / flapping / like church bells / summoning the faithful / and unfaithful / to worship, / to war, / towing their ships / towards shores / they'll never reach, shores already discovered.

Three Poems

Do you remember the big knob we’d unspool across the dial, / the eye to its glass toothy grin as if / there was another world outside of this one and if you could find someone / there you could touch it,

Continual Process Improvement for the Astute Young-Adult Student, Or Lesson as Lesion

where you thought / the sun would be // the sun ought to be / shooting its solar flare / into the shiniest part // of your hummingbird heart / heart quaking

Two Fictions

When Netscape took over the landscape, we had to remind ourselves about the cure for seasickness. Look up and out as your screen turns into old-fashioned glass, invaded by white clouds and rainbow panoramas. When the mesmeric smears of open sea and wind get squeezed into the palm of your hand, the ship divides the sea. Cold is a current of thought where nothing seems to circulate.

Any Other Name

so in demand by strangers / you might say my name cursed me / to solitude. I don't see any prophets around, / do you? If so, pass out my number / tell him I said what's up // where have you been all my life

Six Poems

Freedom, or fission. Or both, of course. Of course, of course, of course. It varies, to some degree. Distributions arise. How to part with this; parry that. How to calculate the number of dimensions in this domain. You say variance and I say divergent. And then we say nothing at all.

Route Desert

Sand divines my desiccation. So too with culture, words I use to speak my distance from the desert. Culture too resides in me an intercourse most internal.

Two Poems

Eventually his smile starts to look like Golgotha / U feel urself choking on his shadow / Something (how can it be) both soft and sharp / He keeps saying “we’re already in communism, look harder” // Avoiding death is / losing the game of exile

Three Poems

in passing some / all thresh and bark / to be sure / they are // in the / mundane // concrete / brutalist

through All the World's Futures

The keys are built into the sky / And a boat at every center / Red drops from the ceiling like / a night coming on and closing / and the sky it drops this way / to open. heaps of keys inside

Ave Maria

To resist the world is to admit that there is an unbreaking / absence at the heart of life. Here, I have tried to find a way to / surround it, to put a roof over it. To extend the eaves in a line / that mirrors the earth’s own horizon, that brings some sense of / scale to the infinite.

Three Fictions

On Wednesday, the dust of their arguing threatens to choke them. They rush to open every window, turn on the ceiling fans. It all starts when she puts his desk inside the bathroom. He looks ridiculous when he sits on the toilet. The toilet is much too short to be a functioning chair.

Three Poems

The circumference of recovery descends around your belly like an inflatable tube in the Hudson. The room returns to the sun from your lap as I wait for you to surface at home. Our non-negotiables are hardwood floors and strong family values. I swap my head for your tongue and your storge for my optimistic forecast: our future is clear blue ultra and the furthest thing away from the frame.

Dear Letter Dear World

I won't / describe for you the sense of dull occasion / that soaks the degrees of this day, fifty– / eight of them at least, hot salty sap / running out of my eyes and lying where / it lies. That's wrong.

Repro

The room: Reagan era red, fake / curtains, silk fishtail fern, mustard / satin bed spread. Midwestern painted / rainbows. She’s got a cold / from her two-year-old. / The other woman talk over / the procedure. The someone holding / her hand, not her husband. That you are afraid of dying when you are trying to find your life.

Four Poems

This is what allows me to act. Her hands warmed by the mug. The mug hot from the coffee. The coffee boiled by the kettle. The kettle scalded by the stove. The stove ignited by the match. The match struck by her hands. Trying to listen to who is speaking.

poems inspired by Man Ray's film 1926 "Emak Bakia"

your own importance cannot stand still

Two Poems

Kissing in Public

from Mr. &

I threw the coins in the water in such a way I almost moved.

Six Poems

I FEEL YOU: A MIXTAPE OF ARTISTS OF COLOR BY ARTISTS OF COLOR

Elegy: Sappho of Lesbos

as if I could perform such impossible / pleasantrie

From Uline to Zero

from Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners

Family Teachings

Four Poems

Life of a Drowning

There is no room for me except what I can carry too

excerpt from King of the Street

Two Poems

Either way we must revise / the ship we sail in.

Three Poems

How Do I Look?

A man holds up a mirror and kills her... nothing mythical about that

Fig. 287: Diagram the shipwreck before the shipwreck.

The Carry Letters

The Consequence of a Flag 

Deciphering the Language of Fabric

By home, I don't mean a cinematic notion of beauty

It’s obvious, but the trouble remains sorting my desire from desire.

Two Poems

Ghost Frequencies

Every day I learn how to survive the day & then the day is over.

Natürlicher / vis-à-vis land, animal

from The Travel Letters of X

the part you always forget is that / it’s actually happening. Sometimes at night I sit in the kitchen and arrange sugar cubes / on the windowsill.

One Poem

43. Believe in what will die before you will.

Three Poems

Three Poems

Four Poems

I don’t know how to kneel / properly among these flowers. It’s January. Every agate is an expert / at breaking and repairing.

A Poetics of Iteration

Celestial Body Language

Chain Letters

A question resembling a law. A law resembling a legend. Death as a challenge. A challenge to biological irony.

Just The Surface Things

This is to say, everything happens underground.

Three Poems

if you feel yourself / becoming stranger howdy stranger

How I Got To Here

Ten Photographs of Boyfriend Mountain

Your Life Is Like A Kaleidoscope

Systems

the word 'cure' is a Rubik’s cube I turn over and over and over

Three Poems

I may never be done living in all of this

She lived and it was unremarkable" Everything tastes so much better when your muscles pain like that.

Moment is within momentous

The shadow and the actual, what's the difference? They may say to us, the nest has been destroyed, or the hunter escapes.

Five Poems

Five Poems

Five Poems

I was knuckle-deep in pursuit, inching myself out like tickertape

Four Poems

The Bronx: A Bibliography

Five Poems

Four Poems

Three Poems

I/You

People Sit Where There Are Places To Sit

Three Poems

I could do this for a living I alleged outloud as long as I’m awake revolution is repetition

Simple Machines

How many ways are there to know? How many of those ways can be in poems?

Three Poems

Bead

I have been looking for ways to show thanks for a gift that I do not understand.

Five Poems

Near Translatable Thing

Five Poems

any little floss / clichéd / today / any cheat

That interior language, so rarely translated

Oldest trick in the book, when the garden becomes paradise.

Four Works

But we live in a world where most things are like fish.

Misogynist Gods

Four Poems

It is sad when you are looking at the ocean and you think _the_ _ocean is so beautiful_

Four Poems

Who Goes There? (boomed the voice)

The monster: a thing, a place, unseen, an absence, an other, a growth, a feeling, inside, beside, right here, in the bright sun.

Mysterious Objects

Movie Star with Vanilla Milkshake

Edges & Fray (gathered for Narrative & Nest)

For a writer, the most primal form of shelter is a word.

How Person To Be

because you can’t always love somebody and their work

Among Elsewhere and other poems

I is what I attend to

Split in Half and Doubled

I can feel my body inside of my body

Remasters of Reality

The Moons of Mars

Try reading poetry to an idiot dog.

10 Recent Google Searches Pertaining to Writing Projects Completed or In Progress

Colors Come and Go

The Sharper Enigma

Dependent Form

I am again caught with the problem of the page and the anxiety of composition.

Small Numbers Are Big

Once, Again (Ten Tokens)

Mistypings of Miswritings of Mishearings of Misreadings of Lisa Robertson

Lost & Found

Three Poems

At The Movie Theater and other poems

In the Sixth Month, Wu Year of the Horse, Fire Broke Out

Color of the Mediterranean

Sunday Ten

American English

Diminishing Returns

Cotton in Advil and other poems

Last Words of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Three Poems

Forgiveness is a grass that grows at the edge of the / desert

Boon

she helps / us write / tie / the hot / throats up

Two Poems

Three Poems

Four Poems

I wrap my idea of love / around a china bone: I am getting tired

Five Poems

Three Poems

I have sex / with myself to see / who I belong to.

Five Poems

I aged / rapidly like a broken piano I pulled / the emergency break

Three Poems

Two Poems

Five Poems

Four Poems

Five Poems

NPR

Three Poems

Four Poems

they are always teasing you with their candy or sucking their / golden teeth

Four Poems

Dear Stray Volcano