Poetry

They said that’s where Lulu went, that was the smell. Not rats. Fifty years go by. They say Yes. They don’t change their story, it’s true. A low cement block fence around the house, a collie dog bark, four kids. Not collie, but collie dog, Howdy as in Doody, The Stooges on someone else’s TV….

I’ve come home, to sit inside this house among the locusts and the crickets, their goodbye duet, their chitter and squeak of So long. Packing his things to make room for my own: his pale blue Easter suit, his Bowie knife, its leather sheath branded with Nashville. Catholic medals, a finger’s length statue of Christ…

The meadow hears everything—or does it? Perhaps the short-haired girl up to her knees in grass is the one who takes it all in. She’s skin and wide eyes, alertness and hurt, as if she can remember the fireflies sparking on some future night, the voices saying I want to be like this forever. As…

Like a voice drifting across low damp ground     it is always there. I have whole files on the subject. There is nothing more to know.     My name hangs like a sign outside an old inn, a painted figure for illiterates, blown to and fro.     Last night I had a dream of finally…

Sing for us whose troubles are troubles we’re lucky to have: cold orange juice, and cold coffee, corridor after corridor, as our circadian rhythms fall into place: work is a refuge from home, and home from work. We have task force reports, but no tasks, and no force, so far removed from concrete and crisp…

for lunch he made her sweet peas with milk and butter her favorite­— and after school he taught her lessons in French kissing until the grandmother caught her snuggled in his lap fingering combat ribbons and stripes the smell of aftershave and tobacco safe and after all what did she know when she was pulled…

In tennis shoes whitened with toothpaste Running next to a hoop steered with a stick From the hill down the footpaths of Aptekarka park I’d like to see myself today Through your boy’s eyes. Our shared shame Under the duckweed of still ponds. Above them, in that past now, the rusty sun. Which of us…

Sometimes I’ve wondered why it seems happy enough. It hangs around like a meek reminder of smallness, and chirps its slight sound, and flashes its dull brown, in the vague green of summer. And it must think that there in the spread of leaf, where it pauses on a branch, it is hardly ever noticed,…

The intern’s wand assayed your abdomen with wavelengths    sounding the nocturnal pool she swam within    pale cave dweller    tipped down to pass between existences    asleep forehead globed beneath her body’s question There she is    Everything’s okay    except the blood    a sudden flux enriched your gown tear in the placental wall    Nothing wrong the intern said   …