Faces loom and eclipse under heaven’s attentive glare.Hieroglyph eyebrows. Burnished cheek. Dark scribbleof beard. He wants to know: How far can you see into meby the roar of this morning’s light? The surface of his lipslike the thirsty surface of sandstone or granite. Am Ibecoming statuary? he asks. Then let me be monument.Long ago, men…
My dresses huddle in their closet.No histrionics, no tears. They’re undaunted,unhaunted, since you disappeared.Torture by laundry and mothballis all I can offer them, though it’s Christmas.And despite the holiday, there’s endlesswrestling on tv. Is that your nudge to me:toughen up and roll with the punches?Here on earth, another rough era is birthed.Sea monsters burst from…
He held my hand on the ride from El Centropast the sugar beet plant its smell of dying frogs like the ones we’d dissected in biology lab the formaldehyde on my fingers for days the way lettuce smelled like slicing or tomatoes little hearts They formed a white mountain the sugar hulls sweet climbing hillgated & locked beside alfalfa fields The desert sky roiled…
We’re all waiting for Yolanda, Yolanda’s all we think about, the Yolanda no one says aloud. We say your wife instead or your nobya, since they’re as fierce as any storm especially during their monthly. Lorenzo says he’d like to be the first to taste her spray when Yolanda makes landfall, and we all laugh…
The Houston nightclub, long shut down, whereI once spent Friday nights. Someone shoots up Heaven,both bars and the smalldance floor in the back.But the patrons, all justmy memories now,ethereal, wisps of smokeand soul, don’t noticeor care. The bulletsspray through themwhere they cluster atthe second bar, blurringtheir bodies as they flirtand throw back cocktailsthat turn to…
Fooling around, witnesses said, the man pushing his friend off the dock with his foot when he couldn’t wake him up. Svedka bottle back and forthall afternoon, the one passed out, the other working him, cajoling, needling,wheedling, that if he didn’t wake up, wake up right now, he was going to push him in, thinking in his own…
1749 I never answer when my mother searches for me. She calls to me in Dutch and sends the dogs after me, but I hide in the tall grass. Foxy and Abby are great big bulldogs, one mottled like a rainy sky, one white as snow. They never bark when they find me; instead, they…
I The woman who had the job before I had the job was supposed to train me for a month. That was the plan. I would start in July and she would leave in August and we would, like waves, or words, or worries, overlap. But my contract was caught up in an air conditioned…
Suboxone—illusory, nomadic,practical; the lighter with a sunseton the ledge, the roominess of midnightsin small towns nodding out. All this I like.The cigarette stubbed out on the rearviewmirror—this too I like. The little things:Cars lined up at seven a.m. beforethe gate to see the meteor craterhas opened. Ruins of a Shell station.The stand set up along…
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