Poetry

                     You will grow up to be a restless man with cold hands                      and a hard-to-reach heart                the gypsy woman told me                            as she opened my palm. I was seventeen then, my hands unmapped,                            my heart as inaccessible as Tibet.          A soap opera played soundlessly on the TV                in…

Ham sandwich, food poisoning, own vomit. Plane crash. Car crash, motorcycle crash, bicycle crash. Slit wrists. Suicide by shotgun blast, suicide by hanging. Carbon monoxide poisoning, leap from hotel window, leap in front of subway train. Natural causes. Overdose of pills. Heart disease. Double suicide with mother. Brain tumor, defenestration, erotic asphyxiation. Victim of hit…

Our father wanted to climb Mount Moriah and we refused to go unless it was understood we were going against our will— unless we could climb by suffering, dragging ourselves step by step through the boxwood glade, withheld birch, glinting ash, oak bent to the will of the south wind— that was our secret, denial,…

He speaks a farewell kiss to me. —Bob Dylan Pagan psalmody singing his checkered face into my sleep, tomahawk at our side, head in the bag. Ready                                  to venture out against the colorless light, slandering a white gaze. That’s all it takes to find the world on                                  its bow, turn a wheel against…

What happened of course was nothing extraordinary except for the bracelet she found in her mailbox—a breakfast of flat red stones, the painted smash of a river bottom. The river, she liked to imagine, in Africa, in Tanzania, in Dar es Salaam. The Rufiji, perhaps, for she is touching a map now and dreaming of…

I stand there under the high limbs of locust watching my father point a black gun into the air his arms steepled for the stillness required to split the proverbial hair with a BB. I would like to throw a red hat to catch what will smack from the barrel but instead the songbird drops…

Swallows, phoebes, flycatchers, chickadees, warblers, and some terns and sparrows are less than an ounce, and are so little of water, more hollow than bone, though of substance in boughs and leaves, where they perch and fly, for how little they want of what matters, bright and unmistakable—aspiring, disappearing—not of who they are but of…

Stoned in the canned jangle of steel drum tunes in the faux Tiki bar, I sit below dusty plastic fronds and nurse my drink. A few stools down, too precious for words, a tongue-studded, nose-ringed, lesbian couple, heads bowed close, whisper secrets and softly laugh. I want their love to last. I order a plate…

I’d read the book before but when the building blew up I found myself drawn in again. I knew the wife would yell, “Oh,” as her husband fell. There would be the blackness of the night and the way the world becomes a gray swirl before our eyes. I picked up a section of orange…