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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…

The Delta Parade

Everything stops. A fat man on his way to Baltimore smokes for three hours in the club car. The porter slips out and calls his wife, he has one dime left and he’s almost yelling. Somewhere south of York, she thinks he said. The funeral procession leaves its lights on and out of this pure…

Joseph

Among the women by the road one stepped aside and joined me at the stuck cart, the dog-soft silk of her breath at my ear as she stood behind me with her arms raised, and we all put our backs to it— then stopped awhile, taking our bread and cheese. I rinsed my mouth with…

The Hair Contest

A man and a woman are both growing their hair. The woman believes her hair will grow faster because she stands on her hands a great deal, walks to the mailbox on her hands, vacuums that way, mows the lawn with her feet. The man has never lost a contest to his wife so, of…

Desire

No deer entered the orchard this evening, though mist gathered, pressed into the hill, and the moon pulled slowly over and away. It is ludicrous to think of the apple trees longing, of the apples themselves scented to draw down deer. It is ludicrous; but what is one to think mornings, finding beneath the trees,…

Beauty and the Beast

Suddenly, the magical horse looks ordinary, the black bale of his chest diminished—and the puffy cat stops, mid-prowl, where each bare twig of the poplar stands forth from the main stem like frightened hair: the voice is breaking its year-long spell. And in the garden pool, upside-down, a young man’s lips are glittering; he holds…

Thorn

1 First morning since she was born I have not nursed her, and I am dissolving among the blasted hearts on the psychiatric ward a man shudders with cold under many blankets a blind catatonic is wheeled back from the shower and now a woman approaches with snapshots and knitting she is concerned why am…