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Kennedy’s Head

I read in The New York Times where Luis Alvarez, professor of physics at Berkeley, did this experiment wherein he thought Kennedy's head was much like a melon. Now this Luis Alvarez did win the Nobel Prize and he did invent detonators for the atomic bomb and he did watch same bomb, nickname: Little Boy,…

Modulation

When I am dead with you, fastened up, enameled, dried on a hot stone and dropped in a well to float with the other dead, not knowing them, not knowing any name or step or skin, when I am part of Law with you, and have the terror of restless movement worn away, so that…

Moonwalk

Margaret Many Wounds was dying. Three years earlier she had been diagnosed as diabetic, and now, although she felt her health rapidly declining, she refused to go to the hospital. "I am old anyway," she told her relatives. "Leave me be." Early one morning she called to her daughter: "Let me have a mirror." Lydia…

Emptying Town

I want to erase your footprints from my walls. Each pillow is thick with your reasons. Omens fill the sidewalk below my window: a woman in a party hat, clinging to a tin-foil balloon. Shadows creep slowly across the tar, someone yells, “Stop!” and I close my eyes. I can't watch as this town slowly…

The Sleeping Beauty

Old hands take her infant eyes. Her hair comes to the razor, lips and teeth retreat, her fingers snap, her legs and arms and tongue unsocket. So the bed is dry of flesh. The bones are whispered to. The sister by the window etches hairlines, pulls the blue thread through the handbones, footbones, boils a…

Van Castle

When I was a boy, my grandmother clutched my chin and said, "Promise me one thing. That you'll never let that mother of yours buy a Mercedes." I promised. It was easy. There was no chance of our buying anything. We filled out sweepstakes for an hour every night that we sent away with stamps…

Dark Blue Bee

From the manger strewn with fake straw, from pinched nerves of adolescence— that gangling second birth of the body— it grew as I grew, a girl watching the stained-glass fish from the choir stall, ichthys in the Methodist church, a small triangular hole in its belly revealing the gravel parking lot, a red metallic swatch…

The Music of Craving

When you pretended to shoot me on your porch with a gun I couldn't see I saw something in you that embarrassed me and the yellow light in your house seemed to illuminate only your room as if there wasn't enough of it to spread into the heart under the stairs to distinguish something other…