The first time I listened to a radio my friend Pelly drowned. My family – mother, cousin Jenny, father and I – lived, quite isolated, near Paduola Lake in northern Manitoba. Jenny, a pretty five years old when orphaned over to us, had hair black as birch knotholes, and the staccato yet elegant movements of…
for Annette It’s just seven. A heavy mist hangs around the track like an old gambler with a fat wallet waiting for a first glimpse of the day’s horses. And the animals try their best to run under it, to run the memory of loss out of their muscles, just to run, as though they…
Now he is approaching her retina. Now, moving into the scar tissue impining there he announces like a conductor, the planet they will board — singular passengers crossing an infinite Atlantic with no arrows of land to crack the expanse of water — when the waves grow choppy they will lie on top deck wrapped…
He held her as she wavered and grabbed tight to the handlebars, a woman in her fifties, learning it for the first time, both of them, I was sure, in love. Watching them like that, I thought I knew nothing about love, nor how to be alone. All that spring he taught…
There goes today with its bucket of leaves, its deep blue bottomless sky, the lights switched on at dusk like wishes for night to rise. Now comes sleep and with it my father walking through aspens in Colorado, hands filled with gifts for the horses who carry him anywhere. They are not shy. They belong…
The loops of our two names are woven into a petaled, autonomous shelter. Leisure beneath the veins of the roof, thin green stalks about us. A gathering of six-legged creatures, a long-tailed ichneuman, an ant lion part of the troop. It is noon. The rest of the corps arrives, platoons and divisions, baskets stuffed with…
You sprawl in the chair in the midnight kitchen, striking matches in the ashtray, igniting vodka, until the light has fled like a name a family only whispers from the years before Korea and my birth. You rise to pack your canvas duffle on the dressel by my sleeping aunt, though perhaps as you ready…
Awakened by fire engines Passing neighborhoods lit by tvs, I watch the old stars Through the window screen, Hear the rustle of blinds and shades In the quiet the sirens leave. Along a one way street Watches in a pawn shop tick And bakers in a factory bake The night air sweet with yeast. Their…
His mother strokes a stack of black hankies like a dead lap dog as I am introduced. She doesn’t rise to the occasion. Disappointed! I am too gaudy, too tall on my new platform shoes, though I gush on cue over the dried wild- flowers, pillows creweled with mush- rooms, the caged lovebirds. “You’re only…
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