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—main character in Spike Lee’s film She’s Gotta Have It How many nights I have lain in bed thinking of you, Nola Darling. I climb the fire escape from two floors below to see you soaking your stained panties in the sink, frying your liver and onions. I have seen you naked in the bathroom,…
Still slight under heavy folds of pleated smock, she swells with talk of midwives, queasy mornings, while he changes the subject, changes the subject as if by pulling the other way he could stop the drift down her chosen path. Each seems to shrink in the sure, clear flame of the other’s want as the…
Elaine and I had been working in the lab, dismantling the sleep research equipment, when the call came from the Secret Agency. We hadn’t planned on a big project so soon. Elaine wanted to go up to Union City to see our son, Grant, and his wife, Karla, and the baby. We missed them, and…
Already at work—squatting, preening— the Cambodians weed the cranberry bog. They’re close to the earth like mourning doves foraging below the bird feeder—the last to come, to take what others dropped. There’s no moaning. They’re chatty, a giddy cackle carries among them while they move together. They’re alive as the frogs that ga-dung in the…
At night the earth’s flesh shifts, which makes the house sigh in its sleep, which sends a shiver through the wood-bones of my bed, which makes me stand up in my dream and climb a hillside flush with gorse and may. I lie down on the peak and feel the kick-punch-kick, and wonder what the…
Her eye followed the slim border of scrolled wood running the length of the bar’s chalet roof, then tracked down to the window which afforded a view of rows and rows of parked cars dull in the evening sun, and finally reversed direction across bare-topped surface to her raised forearm and bent wrist, resembling a…
Along the Avenue of Sultans the beech and chestnuts are dishabille from cold, ice-glazed, cloaked in coal smoke from upended barrels the displaced huddle about. The war is more elemental— stay warm, scrounge for food, search photos posted everywhere for lost family: Nedzad Ljuta, 55, last seen, Milo Medardich,…
I could speak on a hotter than fire riot time and a woman tying up her Detroit promises in a rag. The prodigal child arriving in Muscle Shoals, Alabama—hopefully to sing freedom if only for one day. The migration head swallowing its tail in the year of my birth. I’m telling the truth when I…
There’s no bobber at the surface. Nothing between you but trust in dumb suck on rubber boots & faith’s rusted buckles sunk into mud banks. Eyes trained on the current backed up against itself like a row of empty boxcars. Nylon wound around an index finger, stand ready for a tug come alive. When a…
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