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Carwash kiss

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…

Wind and Rain

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…

Anesthesia

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…

For Mary

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…

Transformer

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…

First Death

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…

Walking Home

(Amagansette, L.I.) Each dawn this road beings with a rooster clearing the pride from his throat he couldn't swallow all night. When trees notice me they begin talking crow since I know nothing of flight, or how corn tugs you from cloud. They are still annoyed with a man who let them think Christ back…

Rilke’s Waif

No place to lie down and say: home, I live here, work here, grow and reap here. No place to send myself. So in this cold night with a borrowed coat and a borrowed bike I sit looking out the window of a borrowed home and a borrowed wife. And this body. It gets later…

Destruction of Daughters

The friend who is concerned with backdrops, not us, but what we stand against, his way of looking at the women he loves, to not look at them at all but at roofs, a bit of sky. To understand when exactly a woman is angry because of the way she works her mouth he believes…