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My love is not an MX missile. It is not a muskrat running in the suburbs. A hen is not my love, with it eyes of grub-intent, with its legs of loose leather bending backwards. My love is not a poacher, shins hard as scimitars leaning on his ivory, nor is my love the black…

The priest taught us that blessing oneself shouldn't be like shooing flies. There is a pause at the temple of your head; you connect one shoulder to the other with a thread of light; your wrist should be sincere as if conducting your body in song. *      *      * On long car trips it's okay…

At night the hands come to the face to push it together again. The hands know the terrain, have always known how the years leave behind fragments of the face. The fingers push the layers spread the skin around rub the cheekbones, find their place closest to the skull. Skin and bones of my spirit,…

The carnival doesn't rival the carwash. For a quarter, I could get my brother to ride on top and come out red as a letterjacket while the spray steamed through the window seams, a date's hand cupped the edge of my Bermudas, his lips opened on my neck. Then, as it dripped dry, the doors…

This late at night, this late in the spring, the north wall of darkness disintegrates, shimmies into atoms swaying on their chains like a curtain of glass beads, each one amber to its insect of light. Swaying, as someone preternaturally thin and disfigured stands bestride them waiting to be real;      yet beautiful if only she…

The Cleaveland Clinic advertises sun so light you could kick it with your tongue. You board a plane: note the exit, altitude changes, any difficulty in breathing. Morning slams into the the taillights of night. We will wait for you. Yours are: a moon hanging from a sleepless eye, a small AM radio pinned to…

My sister phones and asks if I'm getting anywhere. I say my house is full of ashes. I tried to burn the whole mess away. I realized I would die. I wept and put the flames out. It was a terrible mistake. So I took a ride. Long by yards by acres and acres of…

The train circled. You two hid in the algae trees, slinking around the plastic rocks, bellied down to the liver-colored land, getting close, getting closer until whose finger grazed the tracks? Who cares: you both reached the station sticky with blue, the transformer smoking and the train: crash! Daddy! But that wasn't you. You asked…

She did not look maimed. Heavy, slow, too dumb to stand and run when she was knocked to the ground, she took a gut-buster from the ram she'd refused and groaned and groaned if I lay a hand on her and went on groaning as I stood, strange in this life I'd begun, and crowded…