When she came into his room he was asleep and when she touched him, he woke— her hand on his shoulder, her knee at his mouth, and in the darkness, she looked like a boy. When he tried to sit up she covered his ears with her hands: “Save ourselves from ourselves,” she said, and…
In the chapel of the Catholic hospice we listened to the list of those who had died in the past six months. I waited to hear the name I had so missed hearing. A woman seated in back comforted a weeping man, her tears hidden, “I told you this would make you feel better. You…
Last week we had a riot. Pomo, my boyfriend, tried to kill himself with a pencil. Everybody freaked. Then eight pigs rushed in and beat the crap out of us. I got put into The Coat. I hate being put into that thing. You can’t breathe. It smells like piss and shit. Though I couldn’t…
That which you made me do I did. That which you made me say I said. Now the blame, like oil over water, spreads, and so our life together that began in vows—the licensed oath— has leased itself back to us both: what we knew and couldn’t know what our words no longer show.
You and I lay together on a grassy bed while one sparrow chased another from a limb. A bumblebee left a flower he seduced, and flew away covered in her scent. I reached my lips to catch your lips before they turned away. “Just a kiss, please a kiss.” “It always starts the same way,…
Quentin Carter’s, little Junie June-Bug’s running joke was “Where’s my quarter, you better give me my quarter.” Junie, 12, runt of the 6th grade, School 109, Queen’s Village— in your face, pest & joker, “Where’s my quarter, you better give me my quarter.” . . . This morning, police arrested…
When my grandmother left the house to live with my aunts, my grandfather, who spent so much time in the sugar cane fields, returned daily to the emptiness of the clapboard house he built with his own hands, and he sat in the dark to eat beans he cooked right in the…
A vial of it: dusty, warm From being held so long In my hand; the little cork that fit So well, the cap I would undo In secret, sprawling on the floor Of the basement, recalling a scene From Kafka, or glancing in horror At the old vermilion volume On Chinese torture, or savoring The…
for Angie Suss-Paul Around the corner where I lived a beautiful synagogue was burning. Around the corner where I lived. Around the corner. A beautiful synagogue. Was burning. Where I lived. Around the corner where I lived a beautiful synagogue was burning. My father came home in the evening I didn’t recognize him. He didn’t…
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