After Pablo Neruda This piranha in your poem, this river-missile drawn to flesh I once dangled from a fishing line. I know you won’t believe me, but when I held its flapping body to my ear, it moaned. The piranha moaned, like the medicine man moans of a river he believes is an anaconda,…
I shouldn’t be, but I’m thinking About the woman who got shot Fighting over that sweat-soaked Headscarf Teddy Pendergrass threw Into the crowd at one of those Shows he put on for “Ladies Only” the year I was born. How Many women reached Before the tallest two forgot Their new fingernails matched Purses and shoes?…
Before it’s too late—neck- Grope this life’s most beautiful Monsters until all of this disorder Shapes sacred. Until flocks Of balloon animals—thousands Of them—drop from the diamond- Blue sky. Purple hippos & clownfish. Ticks like hubcaps & backpack- Size wolves. A dancer will find A carved-in-butter replica Of The Garden of Earthly Delights Sprawling the…
So when the doctor pulls the camera tube out of my rectum, the old joke comes to mind. “Wrecked ’em?” I say. “I slayed ’em!” The nurse lets herself out, carrying a fresh cut of me between two little panes of glass. The doctor rewards me with a snort, but I can see he’s only…
I loved to walk down to the café where she worked and stare at the menu with the Brains Beurre Noir halfway down the page. She’d come to my table with her order pad, pleasant and placid, dressed all in white like a nurse, and her wonderful smell, strong and female, would enter me like…
In a waiting room at the Kresge Eye Center, my fingers trace the outline of money folded into pocket and I know the two hundred fifty dollars there is made up of two hundred forty-five I can’t afford to spend but will spend on a calm voice to tell me how I am to be…
In the stories it’s different: grief, like the dark, lifts eventually— a tenderness inside which, with all the clarity of bells when for once they ring like nothing but the ringing bells they are, it can seem that at last you’ve gotten away with something, like a horse you’ve stolen that, now, lighter than ash…
Amped-up grid lights growl stars onto the hay-baled dirt ring onto blistered chrome and rust-lace, car-shells taped and painted over to resemble shapes of cars. We’re bleachered, gum-shoed, bleached by glare, laughing at ourselves for being here, spilling beer and sponging powdered sugar from our rumpled shirt-fronts, smiling. Rumbles in the air, our guts, the…
Between mud walls and the kiva wind off the mesa broke his phrases, as we walked with Billy of the Parrot Clan and with others. The windows melting into blowing snow and the ripped- off split-level doors jammed on the adobes. Out of fleeting blue, then white, we caught bites about the time of killing…
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