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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…

I stand there under the high limbs of locust watching my father point a black gun into the air his arms steepled for the stillness required to split the proverbial hair with a BB. I would like to throw a red hat to catch what will smack from the barrel but instead the songbird drops…

When I am the lone listener to the antiphony of crickets and the two wild tribes of cicadas and let my mind wander to its bogs, its sloughs where no endorphins fire, I will think on occasion how all memory is longing for the lost energies of innocence, and then one night— whiskey and the…