I am sitting next to you & you are not there,you’re a frameless heat, mass of ruptured air. to be clear, you are the spit & liver it takesto be human & I want it & I think you want me to have it all, but I knowwhat it’s like to be one of the…
In the country of urgency, there is a language. —Grace Schulman I must have said somethingto the man in my confusion when I put my hand on his shoulder long enough for a cement truck to breeze by—it would have killed him— instantly, I think, when the light changes and its change falls through our long…
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…
To Yusef Komunyakaa When I rise from the bankthe water’s slow as shadowin my steps, thick as blood.The whole river’s secretive,still, dark as rouxcooled in the skillet, as rank,as sweet, ancient as catfish,ancienter. The moon’ssifted light clouds rumorto lilies or daffodils,an egret on the farther shore,a hunger, a stare, a patienceI could recite. We havewaited…
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