Death does not speak to me with meaty breath although ancient hamburgers dance through my veins and the leering buffalo skull on the wall above my couch dribbles drool onto my heart. At fifty, I have learned to see the Grim Reaper in all his disguises. I can see him in a can of Budweiser….
Your head is the heaviest cabbage in the world, full of spiced apples and lamb. Where you are is where you must be—a gravel parking lot by a squat cinder-block building, slumped, a dropped marionette. You breathe, a ray aside a bucket of chum— after giving up the hook. The bow toward the big city….
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…
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