1 I know all that's wrong with coveting your neighbor's life, but I want the one I've invented for this couple in front of me in line at the license bureau. I can see the pulse in his temple, the faint down along her jaw. But I can't understand their constant murmurings, so practiced they…
1. If under the full snow moon you can keep breathing—I'll be glad if I'm alive tomorrow, I said to myself driving the back roads in yet another storm. I had never seen such poverty—Mae stoking her stove from six in the morning until late at night. “Kind of lonesome, don't you know, alone, the…
The water on the lake is still as love become permanent desire, like oil. The fields for hundreds of years fields of grass, potatoes, sugarbeets or wheat, are a graveyard where the stones look southward in a soft curve and the country road is a suburban street. Here my father lies dead by his own…
When you collapsed on the roof in the heat I dragged you down the shingles, the cedar splitting, your blunt fingers and hands with their old bashes and scars, thudding against my arms, banging the wood. The sky that clear blue space in the flame backed off like an open palm. I slid you…
1 This morning, everything went with the tide: Deirdre's doll, Heather's hat, the Meow-Mix cats, all but this surge inside, nerve-sheaths white, blue-green, my ramrod spine loose, flexible at last. How to possess ourselves at 5 a.m.? When they come to me feverish and pocked, I tell them to brush their teeth, gnaw on a…
Our faces pored over his grave in benevolent incomprehension. He swims in his coffin like a diver watching the surface above—our faces small as petals breaking in the change of seasons. Our silence blooms rust and yellow, desperate as chrysanthemums. The cooler weather wears the bones in the body down to the heart.
When Gilda tries to imagine what Phoebe Morrow looks like, she pictures Amelia Earhart in her rumpled jumpsuit, those fetching goggles and helmet rising straight from the cockpit, long scarf floating straight back, until Gilda realizes that what she's seeing isn't Phoebe or Amelia Earhart at all, but, rather, Snoopy as the Red Baron. Lately…
My father strokes each boot with wax. The smell's licorice. Sounds of wings as he buffs the black hides to spit-shine against his knees. I'd shave my face— echoing moons smooth, by either shoe. But men are measured to their glow. When night heels in, foot to sole, it's not brilliance he sees. I funnel…
By the selvage of the sea-green water I arise, sand-cast from the hands of two young girls. Born through the sun-baked unselfconsciousness of hours, embroidered with flotsam. An abalone, mother of pearl becomes my sea ear. With this shimmering bowl I listen to every sound. A flotilla of sea lace, scooped up dripping, waves for…
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