At the bar in Otto’s near 5th, both off from work, the heavy foot traffic of silhouetted commuters hastening home outside, and us, here two drinks in. The conversation has just ramped up and he wants to know why I did it, how I could have betrayed our family. The bartender is in night school,…
While our apartment hovered on the brink of a four-sided civil war over a miraculous microwave I’d bought at a flea market in Fremont, my little brother’s best friend, Ricky Daddy, tried to live off the food given out at student-body meetings on campus. Monday it was the PSA, Tuesday the ASA, Wednesday the PSU,…
On the glassed-in back porch of a friend’s house on Folsom, I slept three weeks on a heap of patterned wool blankets, a large ziploc of granola and a jar of pistachios on the sill. I woke to bus traffic in the floorboards and sun on my face, drank thin coffee and scoured the listings…
When the little bulls, so-called, rained down From passing rainclouds like little bullets Unexploded, wishing only To scrub themselves away on their armored backs In postures of convulsive surrender; When we, trainees, young men and boys With imperfectly formed morals, flipped them Onto their sticky ridged bellies With wooden spoons, then nudged them On their…
Over-aged, over grave, overlooked brother Seeks adjoining variable female structure Covered in chocolate, cinnamon, molasses, Freckled, sandy or sunset colored flesh Expressively motored by a blend of intellectual Fat & muscle while several complex & simple Emotional frequencies pulse along her veins. Must be a careful & moderately self-indulgent Cinematographer, modestly self-conscious, reasonably Self-important, spiritually…
A brother versed in spiritual calisthenics And cowboy quiet seeks funny, lonesome, Speculative or eye-glassed lass. Shopaholics Welcomed. Also Prince fanatics, museum Cashiers, & pragmatists conversant (lipstick Or no lipstick) with a hipness substantial Enough to contract around a muscle as well As expand around a child. Fear of boredom is ideal. Fear of dereliction…
You have a gun but to use the bullet You decide your wife, having snuggled it Under her tongue, should then smuggle it Into your pie hole but she swallows it. You have a gun but to use the poison You have your son dip a rose in venom So strong the smell alone will…
Maxine Waters, being of fire, being of sword Shaped like a silver tongue. Cauldron, siren, Black as tarnation, black as the consciousness Of a black president’s wife, black as his black tie Tuxedo beside his black wife in room after room Of whiteness. My grandmother’s name had water In it too, Water maker. I have…
“Carry on,” they say, Even if you carry nothing But your own desolation, And how much does desolation weigh? It’s like an armload of sirens. When I walk through the meadow, When I walk down the mountain valleys, When I walk in beauty I try to remember who I am. Nothing doing. Out there in…
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