Poetry

If I arrived early, I had to listen To hundreds of sewing machines Spiraling their high-pitched arias Up against the mill’s metal shell. Each woman, a soloist withdrawn Into her small cubicle of work, Sang the crazy hope of piecework— Another zipper, another dollar. A wall chart traced their numbers In money’s green line. It…

Has a glow to it, distant and round at the end of the mine shaft, a yellow malignant light. Once seen, it loses power, becomes tarnished and dull as river stones, lifted from their affair with water. Money that has lain too long in the vault no longer has value. The currencies we so believed…

from The Diary of Francis Kilvert   One bell wouldn’t ring loud enough. So they beat the bell to hell, Max, with an axe, show it who’s boss, boss. Me, I dreamt I dwelt in someplace one could relax but I was wrong, wrong, wrong. You got a song, man, sing it. You got a…

Here where I have driven past a thousand times, here off the two-lane blacktop, the tattered blanket of April tries to warm the icy lies and whys of what lies a few feet beneath the surface of what we know. A loud, yellow backhoe and several diggers delve into the hardened breasts of our mother…

There’s spit on my face and a smirking sixteen-year-old with a cross tattooed on each eyelid waiting to see what comes next. Reggie’s got three inches, fifty pounds on me, but as I wait for backup that doesn’t come, I know that, like me, he’s a sorry mix of testosterone and fear. Alarms and red…

The long-tailed mouse that gnawed a hemisphere into my box of ginger snaps, the dust-gray mouse whose dung speckled the kitchen floor and countertop, the mold-puff mouse whose claws roamed through paper garbage bags, creaking crumpled cellophane, the pointy-nosed mouse with nostrils trembling, the defenseless-eyed mouse, cute and sad-eyed, shocked by sudden light, the chomping,…

Look:             paper screen             blank;             the color white,                         a zero,                         hollow light bulb,           the O            not yet typed. This means                       no imagination                       without                       its imagery. Letters     can appear                                     as bones      (Do not forget the image)             if you     write with     calcium.      Because a subject…

My grandmother’s laughter was an exploding plate, the kind that the traveling salesman said would never break, and he’d fling it against the kitchen floor just to prove his point, and the plate would spin making a kind of high-pitched whine. My grandmother’s laughter was like that, too; almost soundless, like it was running out…

Call it the distance at which certain universals quiver into focus. Call it a kind of motif in the face, a relief in recognition, a cathartic thrill from the comfort of a couch. It’s why a Russian can write of slow death, and an American can feel his scrotum tighten as he reads the tale—even…