“What’s wrong with Vanderbilt? Not that she’d get in necessarily,” Mrs. Holtzmann said to no one in particular. “There are plenty of good schools in the South.” She stood in the doorway of her classroom with her arms crossed. “Heil Holtzmann,” Audrey said under her breath. It was Monday. She was kneeling at her locker…
So here are the strange feelings that flicker in you or anchor like weights in your eyes. Turn back and you might undo them, the way trees seem to float free of themselves as they root. A swan can hold itself on the gray ice water and not waver, an open note upon which minor…
When I meet you, it’s not just the two of us meeting. Your mother is there, and your father is there, and my mother and father, and what they might have thought of each other. And our people—back from our folks, back—are there, and what they might have had to do with each other; if…
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…
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