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First Things

I am the blue woman stroking a beaded earring searching for the right song at the red light blue woman, 107 degrees, mesquite trees fingering the winds skirts of dust blown back like Marilyn Monroe I am the blue woman wanting a new lipstick some comprehension of Rwanda an hour of silence so cool and…

Squash Flowers

We were both sitting in old-fashioned green metal lawn chairs that rocked back gently on metal tube frames if you wanted them to, and I did. I rocked as I sipped the strong, lemony tea up through the straw, hoping Mrs. Eelpout would tell me a story. She was sniffling, still getting used to the…

from German Chronicle

You can’t abandon me now when I’m dead and need tenderness. —Zbigniew Herbert I.  Cut Photograph: 1941 My mother cared most about beauty. Its absence hurt her like sickness, like loss of life. So she cut the photograph where I ride on my father’s shoulders at that place on his chest below the heart where…

Tiger Frame Glasses

T he squad was made up of three girls from a school. The girls’ names was Debbie, Donna, and Shenay. They was stalwart, steady, and statuesque, always going round not hurting old people or weak boys but helping them. They strolled down Ronald Drive and Cahill Street to Nathalie Avenue to way over to Jefferson…

Wind

in spring revises bright calligraphies of grass. Small revisions. Not like winter’s chop- logic. For you who seek in nature resurrections: each green shoot corkscrews a rotten leaf, and though our DNA’s the same, my twin’s not me. Wind’s a death wish rumor hissed from green to yellow head all summer. I wish I’d gotten…

Lunacy

The ocean all day turning its pages, as if the swelling would come, finally, to an end; as if the ending this time would be a different story. It’s that the gulls cried or laughed when I passed them. And the gritty itch of sand in every corner, every crevice,     every fold. The air…