He sailed to wherever the sirens were, surviving by lashing himself to the mast. An image of stalwart resistance, or weakness. And the singers mere angels. And heaven only desire, simply the illegal. Sailed into the not-quite world. Or returned home to slay the suitors who had been feasting there for years. What about afterwards?…
Before they had ever lived in the house, somebody’s useless cow had sickened and died in the shed next door. The shaggy rope that tethered her still lay in a corner, so when Sonia figured out that her older sister, Goldie, was having to do with a boy, she got up in the night, disentangled…
Forgive us, we don’t exactly believe or disbelieve What the President tells us regarding the great issues Of peace, justice, and war—skeptical, but distracted By the swarm of things. The young Romanian poet in LA Said shyly: “In Romania, bums are only bums, but here In America the bum pushes a cart loaded with his…
The women said, “You wished the rain on us and now you are leaving.” They kept the rain and I left. The muck of that place stayed on my shoes for a mile and then it was a new road with a sour mud and red cliffs and a wind better than a sweetheart….
The intervention is not Marilyn’s idea, but it might as well be. She is the one who has talked too much. And she has agreed to go along with it, nodding and murmuring an all right into the receiver while Sid dozes in front of the evening news. They love watching the news. Things are…
In the dream there’d been difficulty— tidal wave topside while elsewise the cat had to be taken away and left yet again on a farm framed by a row of small houses. A tangled mass hissed and we woke and went on and found a pay phone, called the weather station. Wondered what was for…
Every shadow spoke. They listened to the words until they inhabited them, had them on the tongue and in the brain, where we, who do not act, reside. In that image-making niche, they appeared to be like us: a simulacrum so perfect it hurt. They could take us in and give us out like any…
Shame is my sister. She’ll have no niece. Agree in me a tenancy of junction and a process of elimination. One has promises and room for whom to keep herself. A pinkening vibe, as from exit light in other halls, mother-runs this cloister of disavowal, and in the sobbed-inside cells locked to mine I imagine…
When I was young our winter-wear wouldn’t have permitted anyone to look sexy. The look then was like the inflated figures in a Macy’s parade, puffy and down-stuffed, colorful rubber boots, with pompons on the hats our mothers knitted, matching mittens hanging on yarn from our coat sleeves. Fashion then didn’t have in mind sprinting…
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