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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…

Are You Passing?

When Paul Loy was ten years old, watching the movers unload the Allied Van Lines truck at his family’s new house in upstate New York, all the white kids on Ableman Avenue materialized. When his parents told him he’d have to learn to get along, even though he didn’t understand the concept of passing, that…

New Year’s Underground

This subway map reminds me of the colored stripes on hospital floors that guide us to recovery or dead ends (I lift my glass to the Amber line), or the spacious room that overlooks a beautiful parking lot where the roofs of the cars are like tiles you’ll be walking on in the same sunshine,…

Sonnet

Old woman on the rocks you look so happy. I’ve been dying to tell someone I have no past but we share no common lexis for that. And anyway you don’t need to know more— everyone is eager to be empty. This is a nice breeze so let’s just sit here a while growing fonder…

Fort Macon

a novel excerpt Well OK, let’s see: start with the climactic moment and my father wearing his regulation State Trooper iridescent mirror shades so I could see a pair of shrunken images of myself but not his eyes and he stood there in the marl-paved parking lot beside his truck with the red light still…