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Reconstruction

     It must have happened like this: *     *     * My mother went to the hospital with a lump in her breast. The doctor did a biopsy. It wasn't malignant. They were trying to protect me so nobody said anything. *     *     * Sometime not too long after that a lady came to the door with the seven danger signs….

A Woman Vanishes

Suddenly disappears. Flows into a crowd, into a subway from which she'll refuse to emerge. The reporter will write: “She plunged into the crowd at the annual summer festival and never returned. The children found their way to their father alone.” She does not die. She does not desire the father, mother, even the sister…

Trust

1 I was seven that fall in Chicago Heights—we'd lived there a year. Under cirrus clouds and the white convulsions of noon I prowled the fields, elated. I butted down the rocky slope on my sled. each time a step closer to the ditch. Outside was the only place to be. The city streets of…

Spring Lamb

Agnus Dei, Holy Ghost or devil, lambent tongues of knowing skip across the desert skin. 3 A.M. I sit up straight, wait it out in bed awake, bring the twin soles of my feet together barely just till each becomes the reach & touch of self & other. A stranger's kiss. I press then, press…

Below the Power Plant

Down by the river the furnances are big enough to make you believe in steel and the eternal light bulb, the stamina of Northern cities orphaned by the winter. There's a man who muscles the switches for the two hopper cars, and the donkey engine hammers them up the siding. Coal leaks through the frost-eaten…

Mourning Song

The proper word would be “ceded”— I have gone completely over to the other side. You wouldn't know me in my pressed brown shirt and tie clip. You wouldn't know me with that white paste swirled across my scalp. Did you find me in the group picture I sent? Row AA—a mile from the left?…

House

The civilization of panes, soundless stir beyond glass, it can get you, the way everything moves and moves out there while here is solid stillness. I'd never dare imagine all this house contains, but I know beyond doubt how it keeps me courteous, unbold, that oaken umbrage, fission of mirrored air. Room to room, hall…