Still it feels shitty, filling a grave. To raise dirt by the spade-full, just piling it on. Our task: plug a hole that holds my best friend’s dad, pack distance between a corpse and all it cared for. That the rabbi refers to it as a final kindness—a mitzvah—seems amiss, like a door…
It was summer. I was small. My uncle plunked me into his pickup to keep him company on his run for more beer. I was glad to go. He was a loud, belching man who killed bugs for a living. My father’s brother, with three golden teeth. I recall the calm sun, yellow and smeared….
A certain holy, the black nylon straps becoming funeral dress. My body, a white shroud draped over yours. We make two definitions of the word bury & let them both lead us to forget. Your old name, thrashed down my throat. Replaced with spitslick & stiff mythology of rubber. My breath scented like a car…
As a child I was radiant. The land grew irradiated corn and roses, tomatoes large and abundant. Swallows and catfish carrying the isotopes into the water and woods. The sun rose each day, while the shadows of trees concealed government laboratories where my father worked. I grew up listening to the tap click of the…
The basement floods, but he doesn’t mind. He’s busy as the hundreds of workers you never see in his prints of Inland Steel, those mills that don’t have windows saying the dark is all there is, like Monopoly houses, and blast furnaces, oil tanks and ladders white as lighthouses. Everyone you never see so focused….
It’s the nut house in my imagination. Why Mom and Dad put him away is a mystery. Something about leaving home so you can see it better. He takes a seat in the empty hall. Write about home, they tell him. Once in a blue moon we meet him for dinner down the block…
Do you remember the two types of eternity, how we learned about them in a Wegmans parking lot, when you turned on the radio, the classical channel? Why were they even talking about eternity, what did it have to do with the suddenly broody guitars? You had a peach Snapple, I remember…
Let us admit there has been division enough; our teeth, its simplest actors. Let us admit the past—our translucent bodies’ betrayal: good natures’ good windows. We were, weren’t we, moveable? Series of solid matters sected. Mid-life and un-mothered, historical warnings hum, “Don’t split the pole—” so as not to forget oneself so as…
I too have had my hands full of what keeps me contained, a vastness softened by restraint and made more terrible because of it. I think it’s time we talk about the safety of distance, how the tire tread of rush hour traffic sounds like something being patiently worn down, how the cars parked along…
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