Because he could not afford to bury her, Wilson was still living with his mother. On the whole, though, his luck was holding. It was winter. The power company had shut off the electricity, removing any temptation he might have had to turn on the heat. He slept, or tried to sleep, in the corduroy…
the barber’s best shears, Dona Rosa’s toucan, all the allamanda blossoms, the brown phantom and his white shadow. The cuckold never came home, but his pants basked on the courthouse roof for weeks. Hippolyta sank. The cemetery swelled. The original Christ above the church vanished along with the toothless nun. We found the demi-virgin strangled…
For every forest, there is a pig screaming out like a child as the butcher’s knife pops open its throat. For every bucket of pig’s blood, a bucket of rainwater, saved to hydrate a spring garden. For every Amish-horse-and-buggy sign on a country road, a teenager exhales pot smoke into a pillow in her parents’…
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…
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