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The Cruise

That autumn the baby died father took us on a cruise. My sister and I wore twin bonnets. We stuffed our fingers into the mouths of dolls whose eyes stared like the sea that goes black and forever. Nights we drifted; the festive strung lights were a christmas we danced inside. Mother’s apricot skirt swirled…

The Gymnast

I have beaten the blank mat, but the name that tolls from the wide throat of the crowd is Nadia, Nadia. Magic is not earned and is not fair. After repeated labor against the body’s meat and strict bone, still with each leap or press or stretch or somersault, my flesh in its new attitude…

Psyche

There is a face — smooth, hard, a knot of polished wood. Each night it burns in my hands. Wood is smooth and has no breath. Tap it again and again. It sounds like someone approaching. He lies at the bottom of a lake, I float above. Unable to lift him to this surface, unable…

German Shepherds

In the morning on the edge of the bed you can hardly catch your breath, like an emphysemiac, Eric Severeid pondering the edge of the abyss. before you the clock, a glowing menu, while at your side your wife still lies,                              the sailor in the myth eyes closed, transported on a…

Ulysses Simpson Grant 1822-1885

I He smoked those stubby black cigars      my father smoked and like my father would not smile      for photographs. But mounting a horse the color of straw      or rising at dawn to tour the blossom littered fields      he paid the camera little mind, and kept his coattails      turning to history. That spring the sound of…

Breech: Birth: Dream

for Dee Dog, Dreaming There is always something; and past that something Something else: Jarrell’s words lingering as late in our house the wild skid of a car overrides the night’s news, snow icing blind the world. I nod from room to room, remembering all these somethings come to nothing. I come to you in…

Dune Grass

Composed of air, and thus always composed in silence, sharing the sun’s color, jointweed, poverty grass, british soldiers, do not bend as the wind passes nor breathe with more garrulous greenery. Inland from the salt wash, they wear the shifty winter out with waiting, and summer too, tight-lipped as stone, neither reckless in growth nor…