When the poles clatter past, the years fall away, a spider drops from the petals of a flower, space is ever more empty the larger it grows, the steel wheels chunk-chunk-chunk on the joints of the rails, the friction making sparks, stars crushed and invisible to us inside. There is a distance that diminishes as…
Lebanon, Nebraska She stares through the window to the garden gate, guarded by Thunderbirds, one on each side, the road leading out to the highway. I’m waiting until I don’t love you, she answers. Puts her cup on its hook. Impossible to dry anything. Dishes, clothes. Your cheek where the cat licks it clean. So…
Sometimes we counted freight trains a hundred cars long, carrying searchlights, wings, and fuselages to Montreal. My grandfather and I found Luther’s leaky old rowboat, its oars shipped, across the railroad by Eagle Pond. We pushed it into dark water, carrying sticks for poles and the Bokar coffee can of worms I collected digging with…
Braced against the worst gusts yet this summer astride the promontory’s highest ridge, breathless we stare out across sea-glare into distance diaphanous as mist. * Wind-whirred grass buzzes our ankles here where temples rise bone-bright through blood worship with a view. The present scatters roughly like whitecaps on a sea-face. * We…
for Roger C. Frank A fighter jet etches ink white as sperm on the stark sky while January troops deploy from Camp LeJeune, just like my first husband did in 1968 on his way to Viet Nam to wipe the Commie Gooks off the map. Before he could spell Khe Sahn, think massacre, he was…
The hotter the sun the whiter the bloom, my grandmother used to say of the dogwoods, Christ’s trees, still bearing his blood, and our hearts, of course, in need of redemption. On her cue, I’d wield a bowl of potato peels out past the barn to the hog pen where…
Whenever I remember Lin, I think of taxicabs. We spent so much of our time sitting in the back of one, somewhere in Shenzhen—speeding away from the border-crossing station, or returning to it. In my memory it was always a bright morning, sun streaming through the dusty windows, or late at night, our bodies…
In line with many strangers, we were roughed-up bodies ready for more. We clasped hands. A song made us iron. The line of us could walk and sing. The line of us went on and on—up the steps of the capitol and out into towns with quarter-inch phone books. Some in line knew the gods…
The brown boy hits me, but says he is sorry. The brown girl, his sister, says it’s because he likes me. I say, Yuk! He likes me? Well, I hate him. The black girl pinches me and says, Scaredy-cat, tattletale, little pussy . . . I dare you to hit back. The white girl grabs…
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