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1. Farther north we came to a place of white sand and coconut palms, a tumbledown government research station, seemingly abandoned, no one in sight but sea turtles lolled in holding tanks along the edge of the beach. The ocean was rough, riptides beyond a shelf of underlying rock, water a deep equatorial green. We…

I was spawned in lost waters. We all were, but because I can no longer walk, because this stillness halves me now, I know to hate why a bass pauses, hovers in still water, slime-thick and foul, beneath a rotted log. He is safe, he thinks, at a great distance from death, though it is…

The creaky rocker, the single boarder in his billed cap, the three-legged dog, the sick mother, the endless tasks that trickle down from the corner mills and shops. I have been bad. Even the laundry’s angry, I can see it snapping like big dogs on short leashes. And my punishment is this gray gruel, this…

The pine tree at the corner of the lot where my childhood home, a ranch house, sits like a snapped sugar wafer on a slope. Tents in Upton’s field collapsed and pushed aside for a game of kickball or just tumbling. The oldest Upton girl whom I adore, nearer adulthood than I, her head in…

It’s hard to manage privacy while using the machines: they are so public, and fully half of us are here wanting to show ourselves, wanting an audience for this one triumph—sculpted shoulder, sculpted calf. But to be seen deciding, Yes, the last repetition, to be seen flinching the weights up despite an amount of pain…

Mostly it’s the same odd obsession with nothing— the barren verisimilitude, the doggy fidelity to the natural world. So, this thrust of dark eloquence must be a yew, a non-deciduous blue-green talon grabbing attention. It could be that. Or Death. Or Truth. The abstract nouns stomp around the landscape in their stout boots. Meanwhile, the…

I read in a book that in the Kishinev pogrom Forty-seven Jews had been killed But elsewhere I had read That forty-eight Jews had been murdered By fire, by stoning, by rifle, knife, and strangling. And I wondered if the author had accidentally left out My great-uncle Ephraim Belkin, perhaps because He was passing through,…

She is not an ordinary Baby, but a lump of coal. Grown-ups glance at her And look away. Only the children Stare. Their parents tell them Not to point. When Angeline’s mother Wheels her stroller Into the bakery Everyone falls silent. When she pushes it Outside again, raindrops slide Right off her baby’s face. At…

At the hem of horizon a distant armada of cars is gnawing its way through the chop of a meadow going like Columbus toward the end of the world under banner of no return. I dip my brush into black. Over a lip I build a black mustache, a small dense thundercloud, scented with rum,…