What happened of course was nothing extraordinary except for the bracelet she found in her mailbox—a breakfast of flat red stones, the painted smash of a river bottom. The river, she liked to imagine, in Africa, in Tanzania, in Dar es Salaam. The Rufiji, perhaps, for she is touching a map now and dreaming of…
Now I see it: a few years To play around while being Bossed around By the taller ones, the ones With the money And more muscle, however Tender or indifferent They might be at being Parents; then off to school And the years of struggle With authority while learning Violent gobs of things one didn’t…
She is unnaturally educated. Can take a word, crosshair it into place and begin its trajectory toward l’ancien. Greek, Latin, hieroglyphics. Whatness is concerned with content. So many private horrors stink of kerosene, bloodsport. Whereness is concerned with linkages. We begin almost demented by the Big Bang accuracy of metaphor. And the Word was ….
Stoned in the canned jangle of steel drum tunes in the faux Tiki bar, I sit below dusty plastic fronds and nurse my drink. A few stools down, too precious for words, a tongue-studded, nose-ringed, lesbian couple, heads bowed close, whisper secrets and softly laugh. I want their love to last. I order a plate…
There was a time when I watched it happen. Strangers pressed to other strangers in one bed, clothes on, air humid with the cloying scent of fruit juice and vodka: none of us giving in to another and yet unwilling to leave the scene of that possibility, pretending to sleep, actually sleeping. Then waking again…
His music, Charles writes, makes us avoidable. I write: emissary of evening. We’re writing poems about last night’s bat. Charles has stripped the scene to lyric, while I’m filling in the tale: how, when we emerged from the inn, an unassuming place in the countryside near Hoarwithy, not far from the River Wye, two twilight…
She tells me, “It smells like your mother” as we enter room 53 (twin beds, bath, 95 euros) of the Hôtel Jeanne d’Arc in Paris, and it’s true, there’s a heavy though not displeasing scent of lilac face powder of the kind used by old Southern ladies of a certain generation….
1. High school fights were the worst, Young boys losing their teeth Against the chrome fenders of cars, Boys as they got thrown and then flew Then hit One kind of ground or another. There was always a second of nothing As the world came back to the boy, As the tooth loosed itself out,…
—after the slaying of thirty-eight children at the church wall of Candelária The women would come in Chevrolets with soup in tins for the children. The women would come in Chevrolets, tin within tin, for the children. The children nearly sleepwalk in the exhaust. They are lost dragging their blankets through the long pepper fog…
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