Philadelphia can be called thicker— home of W. C. Fields and Governor Rendell. I’ve been flying barrier islands and the Jersey Shore stretching to land in this place with some shoulders and other padding. Has Philly sold out its paranoia? No, it stayed thick, a thick knee, a thick elbow, thick ribs, thick toes, thick…
For sorrow we have love and the waves dying in.? We can visit our lives in the country of winter trees and blue ruin. ?For the nameless we have silence.? Where tenderness runs out there is tenderness.? A trail descends into the next glen.? Our anti-muse’s hair is the color of loam.? For gospel she…
Wind takes your hair like a hooligan owl and leaves a deep pocket of dusk in your scalp. Love without pride is a love with no end. You keep calling me in to fill up your head, but the mutinous dust of the dead yellow field says better not listen to a thing with a…
If no one in my family ever spoke of it, if no one handed down? what it was to be born to power and married in a poor country. If no one wanted to remember? the noise of the redcoats cantering? in lanes bleached with apple flowers? on an April morning. If no one ever…
It was 1968 and there was a war between the men and the women. Jane heard it on the radio, where for the first time women’s voices read the news; and she saw it at school, where her art teacher, Miss Hannah Shapiro, had started going braless—great wandering breasts shifting this way and that under…
In the nick of school busses. Office slacks. The rest of the game: Welcome Home, Girl. Critical objects to fragment and pony, sure—but I got this softshoe doublestep down. Books all memorized. You rolled some tardy & went fish-eyed in the cut: a tired, trifling air kiss bye-bye. But that’s the providence of maybe. The…
It was Whitney Putnam’s first time inside the Boise Airport. He stood in the baggage claim watching two suitcases and a car seat rotate on the carousel. The plane arriving from Denver landed twenty minutes ago, and the passengers have come and gone already. He searched the faces of women descending the escalator at the…
We move the same packed box from house to house, off the ancestral farm, now overgrown with glorious, inedible rhododendrons into the rented basement of a mud-lot seeded for next spring. We sweat through shirts to lug it six flights up to a Brooklyn flophouse with a view of the subway station, ship it freight…
As Written by Mikhail Bulgakov Little cartographer, little sparrow, little bathtub sitting upon clawed feet, little aquarium cracked and housing a dead crow, little anvil, little hones holding large sickles, little swan of the question mark neck choking on flakes of black snow, little water truck nose-down in a gully with a rusty tongue, a…
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