Poetry

I found my way back by grief scent and smoke to the daughter’s voice from the father’s mouth. This time you asked that I step outside my body though not far enough to fall into the abyss of night or near the flames that ringed the bed. I couldn’t say, “Go away” because the dead…

The child freestyles in the shower, battling yellow tiles with a steam-heavy tongue.                        Siblings can wait while s/he rhymes the hot water to an end. Braggadocio and bubblegum toothpaste blend, beatless. S/he spits and spits and spits until words harden like lime crust on the spray head. Have to get the neck into it—flexing…

Late dinner at a dark café blocks from Rittenhouse Square, iron pots of mussels and Belgian beer and a waiter eager to snag the check and clock out. Such are the summer pleasures of his work—winding down to a glass of red wine, catching the windowed reflection of a girl as she passes, counting the…

                     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…