Think of something unlikely to live in the mouth. Little rubber rug, pincushion stippled and pink. Old carrot, slug lolling in the salty mist of the Oregon coast. There are traces of a residue chemists refuse to analyze. Now go to a mirror and watch the tortoise paddling, the rope tricks. Granny in the window,…
No matter how many times I try I can't stop my father from walking into my sister's room and I can't see any better, leaning from here to look in his eyes. It's dark in the hall and everyone's sleeping. This is the past where everything is perfect already and nothing changes, where the water…
Winter impounds the waves of Lake Michigan With one too-curious child caught in the frozen Undertow. What I want to see cannot be seen From this window, like the clock that once ticked At the end of my grandfather’s telescope. The child and the clock are overgrown By time and buildings. My grandfather is dead….
By Caputo's Bakery there's a waft of almond left, an edge of cardamon. The mimosa dusts down yellow onto a green four-door. Leaning, a woman, her shadow like a spoon to stir the air, tastes a man. The engine's running. It's a long walk home, tiring, but I can't sleep— the upstairs neighbors fight. “You…
A tidal river. Small planes all day, low across islands, sliding over spruce ridges. Took his canoe after two beers, said he was going clamming. Divers in wetsuits, standing around. The state cop reports the tide was all wrong, nowhere near right to go clamming. Where floodtide churns at the Narrows,…
Complete lack of peace, so same dust which is only as some consistency to the moon's rule over and through the night trees. Here, eat this flower as you might eat a stranger, stem and all and road given to going crazily between peace and hatred for agreement, water slight against slight road, the door…
On my knees in the dark I looked out the front door of my parents' house and across the street saw an identical stoop, the porthole glass wreathed in pine boughs with a flat red bow. I knew if I crossed the street and entered, taking living room, stairwell and landing in reverse, I'd end…
I From the Harborview hospital window the city seemed a predictable plaything. Component pieces of this high-rise map left me chilly and bored. Two masked men bent over my bed. With cave-dwellers' eyes they squinted, and cursed the imperfection on white skin— a trail led cross-grained to my mood-swings. With bandages wrapped, the blood burst…
I died when I gave her the rose, hadn't ever felt so gravely dead. Warren—the brother— resented me, tore the rose (or so she said). The house of the dead is a mile long with candles: the moon is out but they don't talk about the moon. The marble I named doug has been dead…
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