I met Kazmir at Mrs. Malek's. He was a couple years older than I was, though only a grade ahead of me. His blond hair was just growing back from the baldy sour they'd given him after the school nurse found lice, and the deep, white-welted scar commemorating a fall from a second-story window when…
It stands like a resentment. The mind's city unfolded to a huge, discordant image. Recollection closes in on the ancient buildings, the fractured curbs, and in all the places you might have known, women walk in the opposite direction. Onward to their first novel, the fictional release. I look through a great eye, seeing more…
“Here I was begging the Muse not to get me in troble with the powers that be, not to make me write out all those ‘filthy’ words, all those scandalous, scabrous lines, pointing out in that deaf and dumb language which I employed when dealing with the Voice that soon, like Marco Polo, Cervantes, Bunyan…
Like through a telescope Planted in a fresh grave, I see through your nostrils, Darkly, the more distant past. Stubborn your horse skull That knows of the price on its head. Like a plate empty for days We stretch our hands out of the frame. A bloody yoke swims through The egg white of the…
Jimmy returned from summer camp in love with fishing. He swam, played baseball, took riflery and even horseback riding, but passed his best days dangling a five-pound cat-gut line in the cold, blue lakes of Wisconsin. He was sad when camp ended and he said good-bye to Uncle Marv, the counselor who taught him fishing,…
When I am positive that nobody loves me, I despise all musical instruments. I can't endure vacuum cleaner attachments. I hate Yeats, my mother, and all the attention Jesus got. I avoid, perhaps hate, great black people. When nobody loves me, I am positive of it. I devise an impossible Fahrenheit. A heat that could…
Because I was empty my body got me a child, the small idea of a child— some pearly cells and light. I thought of it all night. It still lacked hands or a face with which to fill its hands, or another, lovelier face to fill its heart. Because I tend to take myself apart,…
Entering, I step up into a foyer of tea-chairs and brochures engraved with solemn questions. My friend lies in a far chapel under some candles and bas-reliefs, looking wind-flushed in a half-open casket and black suit, like he's playing dead but healthier than in years. Seeing him hits me like a slap and I actually…
Half-hidden in the kitchen's semi-darkness, Ira stood at a window, watching lights come on in a farmhouse across the road. He saw her figure framed in yellow light, and then she slowly drifted away. Christmas tree lights came on pulsing, casting shadows, dappling the snow outside. Beyond her house the sky hung low on a…
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