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  • The Owl

    The owl called to me from the dark. “Where is my pocketbook?” it quavered. The night before, it played its flute and Sang, “I cannot find my glasses anywhere” With tremolo enough to split a rock. A chuckle at the end of every cry Suggested humor in all this. I had some trouble seeing any,…

  • Two SLABS (Standard-Length-and-Breadth-Sonnets)

    LAST STRAW IHaveNoTimeFor BanterSirIAmAn AncientMariner MyShipWentDown ICausedItsLoss TheyTiedMeToAn AlbatrossItIsA BigPelagicBird QuiteWholesome IfAdministered InternallyLike ChickenSoupNot TopicallyLikeA StupidPoultice UP TO HERE WITH THE PIED PIPERS OF GOTHAM IDontLikeMimeI DontLikeSleaze IDontLikeSteel BandSymphonies Psalterypawing SlobsLikeThese Discountenance Philanthropies NorAmIAvidToBe EyeballedOddly ByAnIdleRibald OboistWhoFlaps APiebaldMotley WhilstHeTweets

  • Ice Fishing

    Today my father crouches above the ice on Black Hill Lake and the bass, spinning in slivers of winter sunlight, swim to the surface with the aura of dreams, in their speckled eyes the slow, ominous stare of memory. Next to the crosshatched hole in the ice, the bucket fills with fish, the water turns…

  • Traces

    Sometimes I have delusions of total recall, tyrannical, crazy. Crazy is what I thought years ago, “You're crazy!” when I built a home over my father's bulldozed house. Nothing's ever lost to me, certainly not the arsonned pieces of that place that erupt like clocks in the rockiness of my yard. Yesterday, yellowed linoleum bloomed…

  • Long Distance

    Here on the phone is Miss Patricia Mitchell Of Nacogdoches, Texas, who is writing her term paper About a poem of mine she wants to ask about. “It's such a privilege, Mr. N,” she says, “Just to pick up the phone and talk to you.” “The others in the class are writing theirs On W…

  • The Evening of the Stillborn Calf

    for Danielle Inseminator, hole-scrubber, midwife, you ache from the scuffle and weight of hauling the troubled cow into stanchions, of thrusting your leek-long arms inside to free the breech that fell against your chest, a steaming new world veined in fading latitudes. Inside the dimly lit birth sac lies the earth-colored calf already weaned from…

  • Rosie

    Something happens in the water: first of all, you are weightless; this is the first thing Rosie noticed, remembers. She learns to swim the ordinary way many of us learn: a small rectangular pool in a day camp in the Indiana dunes, one hour's ride through smelly south Chicago, past the threatening smokestacks of Gary,…