Pascagoula, Mississippi Do Not Enter the green stucco school, cyclone fence studded with debris and memorial wreaths, monkey bars shadowing blacktop where hopscotch, four square still scrawl yellow. Do Not Touch the dodge ball under the crepe myrtle tree or the waterline ringing the building, boarded windows eyes shut tight against the flood. Do Not…
At dark, I make a homesick says a Japanese exchange student in my wife’s ESL class, writing how much he misses his family, his girlfriend, a certain café in Kyoto. I suggest tutoring. But that night, it feels strangely fitting after our second bottle of wine to cap the red pen bleeding cursive from her…
In tennis shoes whitened with toothpaste Running next to a hoop steered with a stick From the hill down the footpaths of Aptekarka park I’d like to see myself today Through your boy’s eyes. Our shared shame Under the duckweed of still ponds. Above them, in that past now, the rusty sun. Which of us…
“If ever, oh ever a Wiz there was, The Wizard of Oz is one because—double-time!— because-because-because!” Mania does liven up a song. We detoured for candy cigarettes. My old pastime— I smoked; he sang the entire score. Dad was well, so he got visitation. It had been—I’d lost track of time— a year? He launched…
Pulling out government coupons for the first time In a Krogers twelve blocks from her walk up So the bagboys and cashiers and seniors Browsing tabloids would all be strangers, She’s slow motion through and past their stares. She feels every nuance of her body As a tense repressed trembling, a calculated Conscious stepping, just…
Think of a lizard as a spot of day-glo green, insect-sized, though in all ways perfect. Lost in this kitchen of chrome-souled recipes for oblivion, he looks hard at me. His skin, my skin, our heartbeats tight with trauma, I carry him out where, tack-sharp, two green push-ups, and a cool survey of the universe,…
Some people think travel is unsafe. They don’t trust the aeronautic logic of planes, and they think the rest of the earth is more bloody and troubled and roiling than wherever they’re from. I’d never been one of those people, though I taught a course called Patterns of Civic Unrest in the Post-Colonial World…
After the funeral, after friends and distant relatives departed, and the house, once again, grew quiet, we opened closets and bureau drawers and packed away in boxes dresses, shoes, the silk underthings still wrapped in tissue. We sorted through cedar chests of linens and lace, the quilts she had sewn sitting by the window on…
There are some things I should tell you beforehand: I was born on a bed covered quickly with a quilt. I stepped my bare feet into the new world of a lamp-lit room in the country. Because of a broken driveshaft we stayed, my mother and I, among the witch-hazel straddled houses and the buzzard-heavy…
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