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  • Crime Scene

    You expected to see blood dripping through his clothes                                            —writing prompt from a student so you kept your distanceso you closed your eyesso you ran as fast as you couldthrough that garbage strewn alley,down that street linedwith dilapidated cars.You did not pause to considerthe wound—who or what caused it.You gave him no consideration at all.You were…

  • My Opera Glasses

    This audience is dressed in the old clothes and humiliations I in my mask, powder woman, sick of everything, my own failings most of all. Someone I heard jumped into the pit the orchestra, during the third act and landed between harp and horn, mangled like a doll at the bottom of a well. I…

  • Secret Fellow Sufferers,

                                 I’ve come a long way to the pulpit today to advance our causes: No more coal-mine canaries. Abolish Susan Jeffries who teases Max Biggins who sits on the seesaw and cries and cries. May she admit she wants to marry him; may the foremen confess that oft in the dark and brute weight of their…

  • Secret Fellow Sufferers,

                                have you been the unwinged thing perched and testing the phone-wire’s teeter? Have you weighed the big Pro against the many feath’ry Cons? Have you watched the brows of standers-below as they fell into wish from honest worry? Sometimes the wind off the lake sounds like a siren approaching your rescue, instead of the air…

  • “Before this dream…”

    Before this dream there is a blue dress, a tangle of trees and the distance between voices. There is routine sorting of like things: bank statements, unopened letters, photographs turned inward from     the damp.There are cows in clusters, truck stops, cinder block churches, scattered     tractors and fields cleared and flooded. Before this dream there is a scored…

  • “A Field of Dry Grass”

    Osaka   Hard to imagine Basho died here in a rented room above a flower shop in 1694, as I pause today on Dotonbori Street, shoppers brushing past on either side, to gaze at the giant red mechanical crab stretching its legs over the door of the Kani Doraku seafood restaurant, its eye stalks rotating…