You will grow up to be a restless man with cold hands and a hard-to-reach heart the gypsy woman told me as she opened my palm. I was seventeen then, my hands unmapped, my heart as inaccessible as Tibet. A soap opera played soundlessly on the TV in…
All Winter I’ve Waiteds. The Then You Came Backs. Wands. Wounds. Tarot Cups. Lisps. Strapless Dresses. Sylvia Tears. Conjugations. Anne Frank’s Looms. Another Man Done Gone. Kleenex After Sex. Mrs. Manner’s Accidents. The How Funerals. The Greedy Toos. Freaks. The What Happens Every Afternoon. The Purple Spot on My Neck. The Eye Tricks. Children’s Bibles….
Now on this table a small bowl of salt, and I think of the lagoon, quiet at midnight, in moonlight, you in that doorway, your sarong a flare: if I needed you you were there, offering. The body is water and salt. A breathing sea. Why do we think we know better than the body?…
after Cavafy Flickering above the pink rosettes and your name iced in ivory buttercream, a bouquet burns on top of your cake, fifty blossoms of flame. One candle equals a year of your life, plus one more to wish on. Hurry, make a wish, blow them out! They’re out. Now cut the cake. But…
They say my great-uncle read foreign books in a mud house in Nanking, plowed his twenty acres, listened to rare birds, disobeyed the tides’ yes and no. One day he knelt in the street, sign around his neck that said: Traitor. Little Red Book spread like wax over him, even beech trees turned. He labored…
They drove the eighty-eight miles from Elgin up to Lake Delavan on cruise control without saying more than a few tight, courteous words. Marion had been experimenting with reticence lately. Though she had told Arnie not to take it personally, he found it hard not to add this to his list of other worries….
Thus what we’ve learned is that our greatest poets were death-obsessed loners who seldom enjoyed the pleasures of lovers despite living in a constant state of sexual excitation. They started as revolutionaries and atheists, or they went to Harvard and voted Republican and mowed the yard. The night sky was starry and told them stories….
Climbing to retrieve my son’s ball in a neighbor’s yard, I caught my wedding ring on the fence and nearly ripped my finger off. Fifteen years ago, my wife’s name was engraved inside by a jeweler friend of my wife’s cousin in Zagreb. Blood spurted, as I desperately tried to unhook myself before I passed…
Dear __________wise, Dreamt you pregnant again, growing further from our days of games. I muttered like a dreaming animal, legs twitching every now and then. If only I might reach up to Mother’s version of heaven or its replica. I wasn’t meant for such a small body, good only for being mistaken for a child’s….
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