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A year later, a Tuesday or Wednesday,           I remember the students out back playing tennis           in air so cold it puckered the rain barrel & my radio said what it           couldn’t say while Big Joe did bench presses in the basement           & the radio went idiotically silent. Remember Al Hibler singing…

this is god’s other flood my whole grave rising into the dirty-oven colored sky on that couple of wings you gave me

The moment before I was born Mom sent Dad to Kepley’s Drive-in for a country ham sandwich. My unspoken name was country ham sandwich. My spoken name was tank because I rolled over and crushed the world, and was made of green metal. I was later called “surprise,” a polite name for stolen. Go to…

Early January—gray millennial sky, clumps of snow the color of oysters here, there, under the besieged hemlocks. I follow my little dog along our gravel road to the brook crossing—there’s sludge and chain oil and silt in the roily water where the dog sniffs around, tail low, lifting his leg, claiming acreage; but it all…

Who knows the secrets of someone else’s marriage, she said We had dinner with them twice a week for twenty-three years and now we’ve heard (nobody called, we just heard) that she’s living with her aroma therapist and he has a thing for teenage boys                       Specifically, it’s redheaded teenage boys having sex with fox…

Scraps of foil, I think: someone’s littered, but the choppy glitter makes its way down the beach. Closer, I see the little fish red-eyed, lying in twos or strangely head-to-tail. Some heads are raised, gaping, as if to question this new solid air where they’ve been chased by a run of blues. Where I’m battling…

In another hemisphere, it might be Spring. On another planet, there might be fifteen suns and no moon. You run the risk of no Miles Davis, no oxygen to breathe, no hyperbole. In the far-off corners of the cosmos, there might be ten key touch. There might be a constellation that resembles the profile of…

I. The land beside me filled with snakes. I would lose my land. They would come on camels, they would come on elephants. They would take Woman from the dark stone room. Knock over the clay. Knock the wind against the wall. Let it scatter. II. The order of the pebbles this way goes. Which…

You cannot befriend the waiter even if you call him Phillip and ask if his daughter is better even if he greets you more or less by name and remembers that you favor the more modest merlots. He is on his feet and you are a chair. When he passes through the swinging doors into…