It was when neon was no longer available That they went mad. There was nothing to cut the Formica. Offbeat shouting dirty words Dropping glitter on backward lands Nothing seemed to help. It was quarter to 2 in a small, dull town Jukebox exhausted, coffee burned stale A go-go girl sluffs on her bedroom slippers…
Snipped at the neck— tangerine roe, milky innards, their mouths jerked open for a final sentence. One bowl of guts and eyes, one of their stiff, edible bodies. The baby inside me bolts. “Off with their heads, off with their heads.” My three-year-old marches the kitchen keen for dinner. She pauses only for a vase…
A topaz stare, the art of self-seduction. . . She looks without resentment at the face The mirror offers her, applying blush To fill the contours with a candy red. His dancing tremors through the cabinet, Shaking her gaze with patience. “Do me next!” He tells her in a voice less rude than brash: She…
What the Earth Knows 1922, a summer noon when I was twelve, I stood above a pasture watching red ants crawl up from beneath the ground nearby, each one carrying a bead, a colored bead, so that the line of ants became a necklace moving past my feet. I knelt and dug then, knelt and…
For the fountain of water flows ever with the water of the spirit, having the one and only Fish, taken with the hook of divinity, which feeds the whole world, as if dwelling in the sea, with its own flesh. —Narratio rerum quae in Perside acciderunt The first wild flowers on Suicide Hill were birdfoot…
When I see the old man again down in the underworld this morning, he and his son— how well they get on together, grinning and talking easily among the bundled packages— I feel as if I've ripped open some ancient buried layer of my past; not my own, my blood's. It's 8:45. They've been there…
for Quincy Trouppe, Sr. father, it was an honor to be there, in the dugout with you, the glory of great black men swinging their lives as bats, at tiny white balls burning in at unbelievable speeds, riding up & in & out a curve breaking down wicked, like a ball falling off a table…
Mauve into purple, bent on foam-green stems, a bank of lavender washed by the rain recalls Languedoc, though this is on the plain of Caen, between two blocks of HLMs. Down south, the hedge around the one lycée is rosemary, high as a young girl's eyes. Here, notebooks bloat in puddles on the grass: school's…
The quarry master's house at the far end of town still tilts on the brink of ruin like a clamshell balanced on a rock as goggle-eyed motorcycle gangs gun their engines around the curve. . . . It is ten years since we lived there. We arrive at the dock this time at dusk and…
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