The heart shifts shape of its own accord—from bird to ax, from pinwheel to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest, a brown bear groggy with winter, skips like a child at the fair, stopping in the shade of the fireworks booth, the fat lady’s tent, the corn-dog stand. Or the heart is an…
In late afternoon I sit on the porch, which is mostly rotted to the ground. The screen door’s got cardboard laid in and the rock chimney leaks mortar like a pastry filling. The roof is more sky than shingle. At sixteen years old I wanted to be far away, and by seventeen I was long…
Memory of him begins in my mouth; finger whet red with Chianti, slicked around the rim of a glass half-full slips a harmonic: sere, sweet vibration a cricket would make if it could sustain its dumb broken one-note. Porch: evening low-slung from telephone wires. Wine on my finger, put to lips: a way of thinking…
and remote, and useful, if only to itself. Take the fly, angel of the ordinary house, laying its bright eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out delicately along a crust of buttered toast. Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest dump where other flies have gathered, singing over stained newsprint and reeking…
What a strange time it is. Princess Diana dies. (Not even sure if she’s a real princess although stupidly she was called the people’s princess.) Then Mother Theresa dies. In honor of Diana. (?) Maybe to appease God, maybe to apologize. Then Ted Turner gives a billion dollars (sort of) to the UN. With strings….
Back when I used to be Indian I am leaning into the shadows, my shoulder against the rough mud and log wall. The old woman’s fingers mumble down the length of her black rosary, her head haloed against the chimney of a kerosene lamp. In his box, resting across two weathered sawhorses, Uncle Big Tooth…
You are the hero of this poem, the one who leans into the night and shoulders the stars, smoking a cigarette you’ve sworn is your last before reeling the children into bed. Or you’re the last worker on the line, lifting labeled crates onto the dock, brown arms bare to the elbow, your shirt smelling…
Washington, D.C. The cabdriver from Sierra Leone, who missed his home, but doubted he would ever go back, maneuvered the car on its bald tires in the snow and slush like a fish through the sparse traffic from Washington Circle to the Museum of Natural History. The people in charge of my country, he said,…
for Mick Vranich Back when I used to be Indian I am sitting in a booth in a late night café, Chicago draped around me like anxious, wasted breath. Across the shiny tabletop Raven leans toward his coffee, wrapping the white cup with long fingers hardened from bending over sawhorses and hammering guitars. Music…
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