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Huge drowsy yellow jackets rose out of the sick-sweet stink of fruit— a tub of scuppernongs wedged in between me and my uncle. He said, “Hold that tub steady. Don't let her tip.” He drove and boasted of his new air pump and how only fools would pay full retail price. And when the wasps…

Her phone not ringing his hand not tightening on hers not his wiry beard scratching her cheek or his pocked look of having looked at her and not looked again Not his toothbrush on a neat wood shelf far from the sink, the hallway stacked with papers, hung with paintings of nudes without features, shoulders…

Peter died in a paper tiara cut from a book of princess paper dolls; he loved royalty, sashes and jewels. I don't know, he said, when he woke in the hospice, I was watching the Bette Davis film festival on Channel 57 and then— At the wake, the tension broke when someone guessed the casket…

The crook-legged articulation of insects among grass blades, thin spiders hurrying their side-wise straddle, and the multi-colors of flies, green and blue, the glint of compound eyes, Dragon and Damsel flies landing: the weight and thrum; the occasional bewildered grasshopper, a knifing of air; a glimmer of gnats or of Mayflies clustered, their quick cobweb…

I feel cloudy, stumble often, knock my skull on the roof of the car getting in because I'm having a stint of daydreams. In one it's raining, weeks of it, then for no reason sunlight returns fingersnapping through trees. In this one it's Paris, a lonely attic, I remove a letter from its ragged envelope…

What hazed around the branches      late in March was white at first,            as if a young tree's ghost were blazing in the woods,      a fluttering around the limbs            like shredded sleeves. A week later, green fountaining,      frothing champagne;            against the dark of evergreen, that skyrocket shimmer. I think      this is how our…

for Ann Elliott The day you gave birth a man who'd had a nervous breakdown five years earlier was showing me his cellar: around us garlic tresses hissed, groomed and crisp, holding their cargo inward, as you and I traveled through years, countries and lovers, exotic lives looking for real love or what would make…

Eight hours on my feet at Joe's Pizzeria and I know inside this on-again, off-again red pulse of an arrow pointing toward the tunnel my whole body wants to become. Joe slams down the grate and we're gone, out on the street where the neon craving of a train shudders into darkness beside the art…