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i am a man’s head hunched in the road. i was chosen to speak by the members of my body. the arm as it pulled away pointed toward me, the hand opened once and was gone. why and why and why should I call a white man brother? who is the human in this place,…

Say that moment crossing over isn’t heard Say the hammer-anvil-stirrup don’t unfurl Say the balance was upset Say this balance was upset Say the outside world doesn’t ring Say the mind’s ear listening to an odd man singing Say the moment crossing over starting somewhere out and in Say the balance was upset Say this…

Fatherhood is like dying. A flood of days pools at the neck. Glub. He was born on the th of June. In the movie version, ghostly Jennifer Jason Leigh sits at the bus station, strung out, penniless, blowing cigarette smoke at the bruises on her distant, fetal legs, and dreaming of an Academy Award. Careful…

In the closet the dress lives, a deep white in its vinyl bag, eternal, the empire waist so stylish before her time and after, its crêpe ivoried, tartared like a tooth, feeding on what leaks through the zipper’s fervent mesh, an unmentionable, unworn, waiting, immortally in mind. Open a window, please, I’m feeling faint. On…

for César Vallejo To speak with a simple mouth. No more big words. Bread works. Butter, a long walk by the river works, salt, fog, wood. I know how to turn myself cold, to cut everything off— I can slice my heart to minnows, but it’s my wish to remain alive, God with and without…

for Gregory J. Pamel, M.D. Dawn is ugly, a fug over day, a tarpaulin on a top-of-the-line motorcycle. An amaryllis has a hideous nativity: two shoots peer from the bulb frantically as a chick peers out of its ovular jail. Beginnings are rarely pretty: think of sperm, woolly mammoths, pre-atmospheric goo. Beginning, too, is the…

Waiting for their release— for the shoes without laces, the belts kept from suicide —drumming, When will they be released, when and will they ever? The hours so used to their own sequence cannot pass one another. Diamond Ear waits here for his esposa, and inside the held-in selves stare at their feet. They hate…

for René Touzet Is music, then, a balcony from which a shuffling of passings is surmised, or is it mortar and archway, or must it be inkling, maestro, a suspicion of survivals? We sit in rows to watch ourselves listen to your danzas and contradanzas, the Cubanized European genres which define a certain buoyancy in…

I hate the psyche. Cloudy today: brown, carmine, and blue. I’m having a devilish time controlling my body’s two gods: theatric, tutelary. Last night I decided again to be a maniac, risking brain fever, like my father, whose temperature once rose to 108: impressive. In our house, only the sick were great.