The last tug at the sleeve lets her blouse falloff shoulders to breasts that have never seena lover, she shudders, shakes so hard I touch the bones inside the song of this afternoonto stop the loud way our fear of us rattles herin the flutter of bugs so fragile they can tear in the wind….
Desire for the good deal, the hot needto look slick, wordless advertisementfor the invisible product, I release youlike the dumpster behind the cafeteria releases these long, festering rivers of milk.Fear of death, fear of narrow spaces, loveof the wine-red mole that punctuatesthe transaction-inspiring cleavage of Jill, my credit union teller, I release you likethe scared-shitless…
The cookies his neighbors brought by didn’t taste like pity— at my father’s house for the first time, after, the locks broken into, now new, when cross the street comes a neighbor, cookies shrouded in tinfoil, a plate I need not return. How long had the pair kept vigil out the window for someone to set foot here so they…
Because there’s no end to cruelty, Lyle ties half a brick to a hen’s foot, climbs the ladder up the water tower where waits Tony—together, they toss their weighted hens into space: the flung chicken that charts its course across clear air, fans its wings and flaps a few feet with all the glory of a crippled helicopter, thereby…
Like grass in rain,my dead grow at an amazing rate. Meet me,won’t you, I’ve managed to lose the key. Death, you’ve outdoneyourself. The lawn a little lake.
When Shirley Weems submarines her Barbiein the shallows, spooking the catfishwhile her brother and me sit on upturned bucketswith cane poles on our side of the pondnot bothering anybody, I notehow the light around Shirley seems so rosy,all a-twinkle with its ownself-contained Shirley music. I pick a dirt clodI don’t think contains a rock, but…
A basket in the shape of a sunflower— still hanging on your bedroom wall. You made it in school. You loved it so muchyou wouldn’t stop making it. Or couldn’tstop. We don’t agree, on what you said.But I was your favorite. I thought, What kind of boymakes such a basket? Professional looking, alltight and golden,…
Some say the Army and some the Marines and some say the Air Force is the greatest sightsweeping over this crippled earth but I say love for example a wedding the bride’s face hiddenas though no longer hers to share and the sound of wailing oh, Anaktoria what have they done the soldiers on your wedding day
and I answer by driving around, which seemsto me the most American of activities, up therewith waving the incendiary dandelion of sparklersor eating potato salad with green specks of relish,the German kind, salad of immigrants, of allthe strange pickled bits we carryover from other places, like we did on Eastermornings in Nebraska, stuffing our Sundayshoes…
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