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  • Communion

    I am the tuck of turquoise water, the slap of spray on ocean rocks. I am the boat, the effort of her engines, the voice of the captain pointing out the woman whipped against the cliff by wind, her red cap. I am the trails of bindweed at her feet, the labyrinth of roots. I…

  • Eyes Shut, Walden Pond

    Water as green as the pair of pickerel nibbling on the matter raised by my feet. The bottom: mulch, scrap limbs, snowmelt springs, and nothing too large or deep. Drift across, flat on your back, a mote. “One, two, three,” says mother to her boy as she heaves him by his foot over her shoulder,…

  • Michigan August

    Far from Puebla and Michoacán men wake to pick peaches and beans. Light rolls out its bolt of cloth. Yard sales, craft shows, the six-pack loneliness of rural towns. On either side of I-95, going to Sonora, butterflies don’t care who drives more than fifty-five for a cheap pint of faith in the jackpots. Mars…

  • Doo-Bop

    I thought you were through, but like good sex, you keep coming back. Miles, what’s up with Doo-Bop? When I listen to you, I hear a car crash, a voice reaching climax, a flock of birds with metal wings aiming for the moon. Your ears danced, when street movements float through your window. Hip-Hop, Rap….

  • Postcards

    “It’s not a cult,” Laura wrote. “The land is beautiful and the roads are smooth. In the fields there’s corn-tiny husks, green and perfect-shaped. God planted them. He built the roads. There’s so much I never understood.” “God doesn’t build roads,” I wrote back. “People do. Mexican workers and kids without college degrees. Come home…

  • Doc

    They kill them like flies over there he had slurred on the bus full of drunk marines going back to Las Pulgas. Like flies. Corpsmen, he was talking about. Six months later I was a replacement, saw coffins being loaded onto transports on the airstrip coming in. Lived through the first firefight, the second; had…

  • Seasonal

    This time each year nothing stirs. The slow earth clings to its few known elements. Its moon lights only this tenth of the century. Autumn’s madness has left the trees. Winter’s sad mists, too. Between seasons, always waiting on the window’s other side, irregular shadows filter the already fine winds in which a stranger might…

  • Horizon of Gun Butts

    The history of my country is in every link of chains at the foot of Boukman’s copper statue overlooking a dusty town at the depth of despair with candlelights of anger burning in every tired palm. Low black clouds converted light into darkness, the man with a fat cigar stands in front of the black…

  • Recovery

    Going south on 91 after a storm, black ice on a bridge. The car skids. Stars above and below, headlights in fog moving down the hill ahead. The grip of tires and pavement and I breathe again. I am like the man who lives beside a stream all his life, and on the day he…