Poetry

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…

Twenty-one once descript ranch-style houses built twenty years ago on a stretch of road that once led to a small-time chicken farm, fresh eggs. Each house dropped on two bare acres. Twenty-one tabula rasas that go wish wish wish wish if racing by with a car window down. No one has ever slammed on their…

artist unknown, Venice It’s an enormous canvas. Beyond rows of oars men stab and thrust, grab each other’s throats, pitch bodies into the water where they sink or else are driven under by keels and pikes. It feels odd standing in this great hall where another tourist is being warned, No photograph. The flash gives…

circa 1946 Just after his release Mas took a psychological test. Three questions he never forgot: Do you think people are out to get you? Do you feel you are being followed? When you see a crowd of strangers walking toward you, do you try to avoid them? To all three he answered yes. And…