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  • Reunion

    When Anna Green walked into the ballroom for the twentieth reunion of Surfview High in Los Angeles, she did not predict that she would fall in love with Warren Vance. She joined her classmates, in their finery, penned by the hotel"s large glass windows, the sky outside black and the cars on the freeways arranged…

  • The Failed Trick

    The white mouse went first, pink eyes, pink feet, then the ace of hearts, the quarter and half-dollar,     the pigeon, the cat, once the dog, who didn’t howl for a good hour,     wherever he was, our old man’s hands faster than our eyes as we lined up on the picnic table seat to…

  • Does She Have a Name?

    The intern’s wand assayed your abdomen with wavelengths    sounding the nocturnal pool she swam within    pale cave dweller    tipped down to pass between existences    asleep forehead globed beneath her body’s question There she is    Everything’s okay    except the blood    a sudden flux enriched your gown tear in the placental wall    Nothing wrong the intern said   …

  • When the Stars Begin to Fall

      The men and women of the Causon Creek Church of God with Signs Following were expecting families from congregations all over the South to attend their annual homecoming services, some from hundreds of miles away. Most would cross the Tennessee border from North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky, though a few were coming from states…

  • Three Lanterns

    There’s our son at the end of my hook     riding over the Detroit River where Tecumseh’s still rowing     towards his oblivion. This boy we’re casting to the land     of the leaping frogs. My lass lives on the floor     where the fish are frying, her spine snapped in half     the way…

  • Poppies

    Clashing paper umbrellas of red and orange. The fur of the moth’s eye- spot centered: wind shakes the poppy, and the poppy shakes the head of the pod shapely as Egyptian skull, bone-dry. Spliced spore, sap and milk: tiny black seeds seamed inside; like the pocket walls’ little wooden veins holding the paper umbrellas up….

  • Republican

    A section of the newspaper, rolled into a tight cone and flaming at the top, stuck out of the cook’s ear the first time I saw him. This was early June, in Corpus Christi, Texas, when I was sixteen and had been hired as the delivery driver for La Cocina Mexican Restaurant. The cook was…

  • Telephone Call

    Put your pain on one side, it is unwelcome tonight, we have guests, dinner is to be served, the pain must wait. I am sorry, do not be angry, do not hate, put your pain away for a more convenient day. The telephone rang with need, your hurt was huge, it was not unrecognized, but…