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 Christabove the church vanished along with the toothless nun. We found the demi-virgin strangled in her hammock.When…
For every forest, there is a pig screamingout like a child as the butcher’s knife popsopen its throat. For every bucket of pig’s blood,a bucket of rainwater, saved to hydratea spring garden. For every Amish-horse-and-buggysign on a country road, a teenager exhalespot smoke into a pillow in her parents’ basement.For every time I see you…
After Pablo Neruda This piranha in your poem,this river-missile drawn to fleshI 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 moansof a riverhe believes is an anaconda,a sibilant serpentswallower of men. In turbid watersthe piranha sigh,and baring…
He takes the bones of a pony, a pot of Earl Grey tea, a paintbrush and what remains of the bodywhere his students learned, for years, to name the parts, saying ulna, radius, tibia, skull. Saying femur, sternum, pelvis, clavicle. Is this not how god made Eve and Adam, more or less? The one from clay, the other from a rib…
It’s been a month now she’s been tutoring a dead girl on Park Avenue. She says as much into her cell. She’s walking fast to the subway so she won’t be late—she has to take three trains. “We’re doing vocab. Great Expectations.” “What’s that?” her mom says. “A blond girl? Does her hair color matter?”…
Derek moved into the attic in August, and suddenly there were guns in Lucy’s house. Two: a rifle and a shotgun. There was a difference between them, Lucy had learned, though they looked the same to her, both dark-wooded and smoothly tarnished, antique-y, as if they belonged above a mantelpiece instead of propped up in…
I pick the lock of every knock in the nightor rasp of leaves until I hear his voice as it wasin life. Even when I want the past as charredas these pine logs gasping for air in the stove,heartwood turned to cinder no hand can makewhole again, I say grace for the cold scrapsmemory serves,…
When I change lanes on I-70 North toward the St. Louis airport, my father points to my sideview mirrors and asks how I like them angled. He tells me he keeps his tilted to show only a trace of his car, a shadow, enough to see where it ends and the asphalt picks up.And while…
Your grandfather and I walk alike,each of us counting the brittle spacesin getting older. At the desk I explainI want to see my son, and I see youare now digits on a sheet. Blackmen in black—the brothers—make sureyou obey the rules. It is like the timesI had to come to school to get youfor being…
No products in the cart.