Sometimes at dusk when the earth gives its sweet breath to the trees,I think how I have taken a stranger’s life and whispered notso much as his name to the asphalt sky. How each year, on my mother’s birthday, I hear the warbled raspof his breathing and it pushes and draws me like a blues…
What they don’t seem to understand is that I like things the way they are. It’s become very fashionable for people to appear on these television shows, these so-called reality programs about people BURIED ALIVE, people DROWNING IN THEIR OWN POSSESSIONS, obese old men surrounded by expired, unrefrigerated yogurt containers and wisp-haired, rail-thin ladies with dead cats rotting underneath piles…
This time the bombs came in the middle of Sunday mass. Leila heard the planes first, screaming from above. Then the first blast shook the entire church, pulled the walls and wooden pews and windows and ceramic-tiled roof off the building and turned them into a rain of fire and ash. Leila didn’t have time…
The first couple of pounds were hard and I cried a lot; I wasn’t used to so little food. I had signed up at one of those clinics, spent a lot of money on diet soup, and got weighed in front of a bunch of other fat people so when I wanted to eat a…
To Yusef Komunyakaa When I rise from the bankthe water’s slow as shadowin my steps, thick as blood.The whole river’s secretive,still, dark as rouxcooled in the skillet, as rank,as sweet, ancient as catfish,ancienter. The moon’ssifted light clouds rumorto lilies or daffodils,an egret on the farther shore,a hunger, a stare, a patienceI could recite. We havewaited…
1. When the brindled cow was five, she got an infected eye. Arlene took her to the vet in Armstead to have the eye examined, perhaps removed. The brindled cow wasn’t worth the vet bill, but she was a pet of sorts. Arlene loaded the cow into the horse trailer, delivered her to the…
I am the only man in the worldbecause I have no tits. I havea permanent hard-on as long as I am tall and itoutweighs me. They say that Ihave horns, hooves, and a tail, but thisis a myth or a lie: my foreheadis knobbed, my coccyx is protuberant,and my toes are flanged. Mostpeople run away when I…
Pretend a boom box blasts over your shoulder. Raise your hands in the air. Twist them as if picking mangoes. Look to the right as if crossing streets. Look to the left, slowly as if balancing orange baskets. Bend as if picking cotton. Do the rump. Straighten up as if dropping firewood. Rake, do the…
If Trudy had scooped the keys from Karl’s hand, if she had trilled, “How about I drive this time,” or if she had snapped, “You’ve got no business behind the wheel, you should know that by now,” they would have been stopped at that light, Trudy fiddling with the vents as the mist crept up…
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