An insane bald homeless white man on a children’s bicycle rode over to where my girlfriend and I were walking and he said, “Couldn’t find a real woman?” My girlfriend is black. Okay, tell me—what does one do in this situation? The man must have been at least sixty, but he was very muscular, wearing…
Next door the room is padlocked from the outside; inside the children are ransacking the cupboards and playing catch with the empty Cool Whip containers and most afternoons you could’ve found me behind any one of these blue- stained doors, my girdles unhitched, my dusty nylons flagging the window, contesting the smoke rings that peel…
Through an open window of late summer evening a woman cries, Ah-ah-AH! Neighbors pause, blush perhaps, then go on with their homely chores, smiling to themselves. What do you do with this—another’s shameless, lonely ecstasy? Or your own? I put a tape of Mozart on to cover our confusion.
There is a danger in living; it is why we file our nails instead of our wrists; it is why we label things away. It’s why when we think of mass transit we think of concentration camps, we think of people packed like oysters in the little shells we’re allowed, the brine & hope of…
As a boy I killed to kill, clubbed frogs on the banks of a polluted river as their knobby eyes protruded through the foam of filth; turned sun on ants, magnified Sol to fire, stalked them with the glass as they scuttled to escape my God-sized wrath. And if allowed a gun, a .22 like…
Love that arrives too late, untimely Eros stumbles in after the fall has done its worst, and winter fills the world with distance and with snowfall far as hearts can feel. Four crows creak in the cedar boughs, symbols that signify themselves alone since everything is what it only seems, the least version of a…
When we thought of the future it was wonderful & well-lit. The sky could hold anything. He chants about Beelzebub, Black Arnie & his mismatched angels, about supplicants & warblers that always tag along: a talisman against the learning the church leaves out. He is on one leg & braced, a shout that ignores its…
Gaithersburg, Maryland At Scot Gas, Darnestown Road, the high school boys pumping gas would snicker at the rednecks. Every Saturday night there was Earl, puckering his liquor-smashed face to announce that he was driving across the bridge, a bridge spanning only the whiskey river that bubbled in his stomach. Earl’s car, one side crumpled like…
By the light of the Last Days— amber, a bit theatrical, a vacant lot light, snowfall muffling the high-volt hum transformers make zapping snowflakes to kingdom come, somewhere off the interstate outside Romeoville, Illinois— the proof of which can be heard— a ringing noise in the ear louder and louder until it’s a taxi horn…
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