From the train among row after row of empty buildings you see a single curtained window, an orange bottle on the sill, and a small child's face watching sparks from the tracks. You can only start to answer this after you've passed it, when the train is already pulling into another town where another child…
“You can't step into the same river twice“ —Heraclitus Sometimes you step into a river twice and it's the same river. The sky leans down just to show the importance of sky, Boys on the bridge are throwing rocks, carelessly, at elusive carp in that changeless river. They do not think of the love they…
He slapped her—just once, not hard—when she fainted, and it's the shocked, ashamed way he tucked his right hand inside that pouch between the calf and thigh the body forms when it crouches that makes me sure they have never as much as thought of hitting or getting hit for pleasure, in their secret life….
For years I've been trying to remember my father but strangely I can only recall him as a woman in a red dress, though his picture is still on the wall. His sadness was a long letter in a drawer we never opened, my own sadness a door that would swell and have to be…
Folding the old monopoly board I straighten the piss-yellow $500 bills. If this were real . . . we thought as kids. That sense of possibility is gone though artifacts remain: the dirty string that knotted charms — flat iron, silver shoe, the choo-choo I might have ridden anywhere. These rest in a junkyard sofa…
There was the bank and mud sloped into a sandbar and what do you care? Spare hooks in a shirtpocket, nightcrawlers crammed in soil in a canning jar. Supper, among your mother's family, was over. Her sister went on and on about how poor the past was. Their father's overalls, grime, cuffs futile to try…
It's two am and I awake feeling you've just left some small diner. I imagine wind swinging through the door, voices closing behind you. I remember your last employer saying you've left for he doesn't know where, a woman in a motel angrily waving an unpaid bill; I've been content most of my life with…
1. It angers me: the cold snap and freak ice storm that's wrecked my yearly pilgrimage home. Coming far from my northern province, I miss the perfume of the cape jasmine, and I want to smash the hard mush of tomatoes in paint cans on the porch against the white house and axe the crackling…
A boy stumbles forward in the bus each morning as his father, young and bearded, with a long body, holds the door. Slowed by a snowsuit and questions which must get asked, he allows people to catch and help him, their smiles lasting several stops down the road. In my lap, my neice speaks to…
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