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The Garden

The riddle of the garden is the garden. The hollyhocks, chest-high, their irresponsible profligacy. The nethering stonecrop. The wax in which the body walks. The fragrance kneeling at the lily’s mouth. The story that is the lily, the fragrance; the peonies, their exfoliate hives. The weavers in their close huts of wattle hurl questions at…

News of the World

We were the News-of-the-World Theater Collective, moving from city to city together; we were all married to each other and to the idea of what you could pull from the streams of the news that ran over and around and through our lives. We wanted no one to ever again let that information splash over…

Getting Serious

Today I started looking for my soul. Yesterday it was my keys. Last week, my brain which I couldn’t find, it being out looking for me, now that I’m getting so old.   First I thought my soul would have gone back to Greece where she grew so tall and straight, she thought she was…

The Gardner’s Wife

That summer in the mound of sand someone left beside the cesspool lid, my father managed to grow a watermelon— it’s not what you’re picturing—maybe not even edible, the size of a softball, but, hell, it was a watermelon, and, all year round, the man worked two jobs in the City, and only came out…

Quiet

The air outside was warm and wet, like breath. Feeling the breeze on his face, the baby stopped crying and looked up at the sky. I turned him around and leaned him against my chest, holding him with one hand curled under his arms, the other cupping his bottom. He gently kicked his legs, as…

Exclamation Point

It could come right now as a dit-dah of rain,     mere pine needle lost in a tree-stack of beads,        thorn expelled from red dot, print felt            an inch from a finger, pursed lips speaking in tears. It makes you look dotty. Easily amused. It starts     like a Spanish ¡—down on your…

Black Walnut

There’s a kind of leaving when you arrive even though it’s the place you’ve come from— how love can be alive There, though not for you, and while it’s like none of the first feelings, a recognition of what is passing flashes, itself passing—there were more deaths, but now there’s     only one, And what…

Every Night

Federal holding cell, Hughes County jail Fights. Never quiet—like years back with the folks, but ratcheted-up, bloodied, multiplied, till the badge writes the last two shovers up, says he’ll do the same for all of us if we can’t keep the crybabies smothered I WANT SOME PEACE, SLEEP, NO MORE GETTING OUT OF THE CHAIR,…