As if bone spilled down the stairway of a long night her marble dress unfolded the seven sevens of light. We had come to see the saint. And on a weekday, only a few of the penitent in the back pews kneeled, old women with the blue of sin already seeing through their hands. It…
A stray cat from the next field over, hungry, finds her way to the feed bowls inside our tool shed, atop the deep freeze. Our tom lets this happen, then moves, low to the ground, into position, crouching outside, staring at the only escape. Too frightened now to eat, she too stares at it, neither…
Lying impatient for the burning copper thread I wake next to me on the too narrow for two bedcage. One of me his eyes squinched ankles crossed I do not wake him he is scrawled with tubes. One of me (me) a mess of broken glass circuitry sheet metal plastic a fist-sized magnet. Hungry this…
Where did she come from, that dig in the ribs? Who is she to pretend she's me and to take on that ditched-in, hopeless tone? Who is this phony yokel? This two-dollar bill, this pig knuckle? Honey, I tell her, my name is Lynn Collins Emanuel, someone whose whole manner says, I'm over-educated but recovering….
The brighter the white veil the more daring the modesty. The yellower the dandelion the more rampant the growth, the health careening toward unveiling. The louder the wheels the deeper the plough sinks in the black field. The darker the soil, the more water it holds and the deeper the plough, the louder the clank…
Now that I'm gone, my pale boy-body near your ear, my skull-white forehead used up, out beyond the lamplight, a Cain trembling on tiptoe, desperate, mute in shadows, yearning down to hear you read aloud from your stuffed armchair, I'd die to point to the art print lifted from a motel wall on the move…
Beyond the dark souks of the old city, beyond the Dome of the Rock gray and humped and haunted, beyond the eyes of the men at the café where they drink their thimblefuls of hot tea, beyond the valley with its scar of naked pipe, the perfect geometrical arcs of irrigation, and someone incising a…
Paul Burkholder always had firecrackers, and sitting on my back porch again he kept lighting inchers, one after another, holding then tossing each over the railing where they exploded, the shreds of blue-and-red paper settling on the shiny green leaves of pachysandra. Jimmy Sterzic was there, too, as always, chewing squares of bubble gum and…
Confused, using no maps, oldies on fire, the would-be sister, Glenda, I inhabit, drives a transformed hearse inside America all night. Craving breast milk cut with booze, seduced, come dawn, by Last Chance Supper Hut, she catches Death (dressed as a stranger in a red-and-white checked shirt) paying attention: I'd got her self large in…
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