Sasha wished that she would never have to see Boshen again after this trip. She ran to the bathroom the moment they entered the McDonald’s, leaving him to order for them both. He had suggested a good meal in Chinatown, and she had refused. She wanted to see downtown Chicago before going to the clinic…
Arturo stomps the heel of his boot and tells me: Every pinche minute I mess up a red ant. That’s no good, I tell him, me the young man in the next row, The shadow of my hoe cutting weeds in Boswell’s beet field. Arturo says: every super pinche half-hour I see this squirrel spin…
I was waiting like a saint before the era of saints as she searched the racks for just the right threads. I was wondering after a hundred years, which is the body and which the clothes, although I would never ask her this. I was staring at the girls behind the window when she emerged…
That owl was an omen Driving home from the airport Not once but twice It rose in my headlights From rain black asphalt Great white wings nearly touching Windshield wipers that low flying escort Stretching sixty miles toward Alabama The owl was always right Something died and something else Was just about to I checked…
What it was like to sit with Mr. Fox on the Blvd. Raspail and negotiate my post at Morlais, then Toulouse, then come back in a riveted trunk with Henry Millers sewn into my lining, Frank Sinatra to greet me in the mile square city, Dutch ships everywhere my father and mother in from Pittsburgh…
Mon petit chou, no more great vows are said. Can’t save, extinguish, master, or attain— My gusto blown to bits. The carpenter shaves a door, below his breath Sings I got daisies in green pastures, I got my girl, who could ask for anything more? The gutters overflow and eat concrete. From upper decks,…
Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back. —Bruce Springsteen The bitter glue of snow makes the seven-hour trip take twelve. I’m crying—have been sobbing off and on for more than two days. I’m a pitiful, middle-aged mess. Goggles is in the trunk in a Hefty Bag and…
Stone turns to buttermilk, pipe- cleaners to dreams, necromancers and pythons to aristocrats and ballerinas. Here Platinum shrinks lung cancer. Taxol, from tree bark, withers an ovarian metastasis into nothingness and Prednisone, cures lymphoma. What is this, then, if not alchemy, potions and witch’s brews, toxins turned to gold, barbed wire into silvery South Sea…
for Jeff Male (1946–2003) When I cough, people duck away, afraid of the coal miner’s disease, the imagined eruption of blood down the chin. In the emergency room the doctor gestures at the X-ray where the lung crumples like a tossed poem. You heard me cough, slipped off your coat and draped it with…
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