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  • XXIII

    The mask tires of itself. The beautiful dream blown again. The world won’t shake its own hand. Air fills with bone- powder, hair-lint, blood-flecks or the body’s demolished light, shattered mid-thought, mid-stance, mid- breath, mid-word, mid-kiss. Can thinking wend a way back to where the body feels? To where it quivers, retracts, roots? Mind discontinues…

  • Salt

    She had lived in the best cities of the United States and Europe, in the best times, but at age fifty-eight, she’d ended up near a small college town in western New York State that was so rural there were more coyotes than people. And so poor that between the two, the coyotes were the…

  • You’re dew on

    I’ve set my mind on You who don’t set your mind on earthly things what have you become now You’re here and I’ve a mind to You who set like an angel cake strawberries that I’m sure for that I hope for when You set your mind on you’re sure sweet what I’ve become now…

  • Lady Fingers

    Chi Chi inhaled the screen from her crack pipe.”       I laugh and wait for Leslie to join in, but there is only silence on the other end of the line.       “You’re serious?” I ask.       “You better believe I’m serious. That child gone and almost killed herself.”       I want to apologize for laughing, thinking this was…

  • I Would Live a Day with You

    Walk with me on the carriage path where we have walked through the park to the cliff where the hawks drift in spiral streams, in clear currents. Sit with me. Read to me. Start at the beginning. Read steadily, we can finish the book, the chapter, the page, the paragraph.   I have no choice,…

  • Caballero

    Only symmetry harbors loss. —Lorna Dee Cervantes                 Throatlatch. Crupper. Martingale. Terret. My breath                         tightens around him,                                                 like a harness. Once a year         he eats a spoonful of dirt             from his father’s grave.                                                             In his sleep                                                 he mutters lines                                                             from his favorite flick,                                                 Capulina  …

  • The Incurables

    When Adam "Drew" Drewshevsky, a.k.a. Dickie DeLong, returned to his hometown of Sherman, Ohio, his old friend Barry Borkowski took him out for a beer at Don"s Underworld and raised a glass to the Prince of Porn. There was truth to the title: In the past decade, Drew had made more than three hundred erotic…

  • Two Cranes

    Not really knowing the difference between herons and cranes, that summer we named the two birds that came to Boehmke’s Cove (which were almost surely not cranes but herons because of the way they flew with their heads drawn in close to their bodies, and for their topknot crests of feathers) “Stephen Crane” and “Hart…

  • Crosswinds Evaporation Gasping

    If I bisect my head what grasslands might I find, what flecks of plaster what walls.                     What genuflects cracks to these streets, vacant lots. There was a sandal, a child standing in it, & dust. Each sequence a leather strap creasing.                     Each crossroads with arrowsigns, distances, placenames crossed out. There was a tollbooth…