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  • June Bugs

    The buzz of electricity circles a yellow bulbin Maine’s humid heat. June bugs bombthe porch light with spiny legs—date-coloredand oversize.                              Spring peepers pin the night,pitch a universe in my mother’s kitchen, exceptI have not yet occurred to her. She is sixteen,and…

  • Provincetown

    This undistinguished        shingled        condominium is closer to Route Six than to the sea so that muffled sound we hear is cars, not waves. The occupants of the adjacent unit are often in the driveway keyboarding in cars. No one is keyboarding, of course, at dawn when I leave for the beach so I can beat…

  • Sweet Disposition

    Thoughts have gone wolf again, hunting for reasons in the dark.Suppose we were never               supposed to fallinto each other’s arms? Made a bone-boattossed all our memories in—              watched it sail. There’s a chance I know nothing and I will stickto you like…

  • The Invisible Book

    Sometimes when I’m reading, I’m distracted by the invisible book underneath the book I’m actually reading and the problem is this: it’s better. It’s like the superball under the couchthat your fingertips barely brush: the slightest contact and it’s gone, gliding easily away, because its form is nearly perfect, there, a sphere in the darkness…

  • In Minneapolis, My Father

    watched a crew wipe the family namefrom the face of our supper club. The new owners slappeda cartoon moose on the sign out front. If I tell him I love him,either he is holding my little hand while we step across an icy parking lottoward a greasy burger joint or he is on his deathbedand…

  • The Martyr’s Motel

    They’d traveled one by oneon their knees beneath the earthto be gathered at the station to be given robes and haloes and official papers. And a bus ticket each to the roadside motelin Ohio that heldthe reservations in their names, where those who’d been slain before them were waiting. Can these be the right martyrs?…

  • Men

    We’re in the middle of it, in the middleof the backyard barbecuing steakand chicken. Telling stories with our wives and girlfriends away,red and blue psychedelics, Coors Lightand breasts falling into our mouths again like basalt cliffs into the sea.Jeremy says, I did CPR on a gorilla once.A girl gorilla, a big one. I kept thinking,…