It's dark when they scuff off to school. It's good to trample the thin panes of casual ice along the tracks where twice a week an anachronistic freight lugs grain and radiator hoses to a larger town. It's good to cloud the paling mirror of the dawn sky with your mouthwashed breath, and to thrash…
One night a woman's breast came to a man's room and began to talk about her twin sister. Her twin sister this and her twin sister that. Finally the man said, but what about you, dear breast? And so the breast spent the rest of the night talking about herself. It was the same as…
This is the Eastern shore. Light flatters the land. Nature is docile here. It is the time of year after the corn harvest and before the geese. It is my annual return. I live in Europe but my mother insists I come back each fall because each fall may be my father's last. The car…
I have a photograph of my father wearing a black tuxedo and holding a suckling pig under his arm. He's on stage. Two dark-eyed beauties in low-cut party dresses are standing next to him and giggling. He's laughing too. The pig has its mouth open, but it doesn't look like it's laughing. It's New Year's…
1. Spring, and so they danced mid-air. He circled and repeated until she paused to a second's locking. Gazing by the window, dishtowel in hand, I almost missed it: red and gold, two velvets shivering, then she was away. He perched on the nearest branch; dead-still, head cocked, as if to save the event, as…
20/The Moon, the Whole Moon, and Nothing But the Moon Glorious, nourishing, flourishing moon, swollen with all the raw energy of time and what it does as light, I take off my hat, my coat, my tie, my shoes and socks to you. Breathing you in like an oceanic breeze, how can I expect to…
1949. I am already six years old and no stranger to adversity when my mother shakes me awake one September morning and tells me we are leaving Los Alamos and moving to Santa. Fe. Instinctively, I sniff her breath for liquor. But there is only the sour musk of coffee and, from her armpits, another…
Yesterday at the supermarket I overheard a man and a woman discussing narrative poetry. She said: "Perhaps all so-called narrative poems are merely ironic, their events only pointing out how impoverished we are, how, like hopeless utopians, we live for the end. They show that our lives are invalidated by our needs, especially the need…
—North wind flows from the mountain like water, a clear constancy Runnelling through the grapevines, Slipping and eddying over the furrows the grasses make Between the heaves and slackening of the vine rows, Easing and lengthening over the trees, then smooth, flat And without sound onto…
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