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No, in another place, it was at a wedding or a funeral In the washed and stamped hills back of Goleta That some large brave dangerous men standing before you in      your party dress Happened in conversation upon the same wide abandoned      road Each had known separately and successfully That led to the dead Boys'…

for my father My brother and I watched pigeons on warm evenings tip like paper boats, dipping a wing, then right themselves on the bumpy air, soaring out over the arc of the Atlantic. At the window, on rainy days, waiting for you to get home through traffic, we heard their perishing cries. Sometimes we'd…

Broken screen—cicadas drill through the gauzy scent of orange blossoms heavy over the grove.            One gangly mantis clambers out of the queen's wreath, kneels over a jewel-backed beetle.                  I lie back. on bare tile, my hair swaddled in threadbare folds of old towels.      The maker coats my face with a thin clear…

for Michael Trombley Single file out of Hebrew history class in bow ties and jackets, skull caps and double-knotted shoes. I didn't want to sit for hours and pray to a foreigner in a foreign tongue. I wanted to cross the street to the elevator, opening on the Viola Gensler School of Ballet, the perspiring…

After ghosts & goblins Were tricked home early, Dragging cardboard moons in the dust, We older boys became demons. We munched Baby Ruths & Butterfingers Before unearthing our midnight Stash of inner-tube slingshots Beside the opalescent millpond. They uncoiled like water snakes In our hands. We were ecstatic With blue-gray cartons of rotten eggs Resting…

The afternoon he explained how the concertina worked, his hands slightly plump but agile at the keys as they squeezed its delicate black lung, I would have said he was kind. Certainly he was shy. Conversing with him was always work, and, though willing to try, he clearly preferred his complicated silences, retreating to a…

I rake my fingernails across a white flecked beard that conceals a renegade innermost self, that berserk boy who dreamt of lizards climbing out of a fistful of mulberries, who stood his ground and hurled his hundred pounds through glass, who broke down in the corner of the emergency room into a red-eyed heap, shards…

for Ignacio and Norman At dawn, I've heard them in our yard, my son's two friends doubled over and cackling, like the birds that fly in from the countryside. Or like two old men crouched in prayer, but for the squeals, an hysteria that comes and goes with eight years. Perhaps, it is the spell…

Hands the likes of which we'll never know again have grasped us, found us everything they wished for as an answer to the body's tendency towards mass and ponderous desire. So it was only natural that they would want to lift us as far away from the earth as possible— closer to lamplight, starlight. to…