All summer Papá holds a cigarette out the window of his laser-green Buick, points his lips left to blow the smoke into the mirage of exhaust between rush-hour cars. All summer he listens to La Cubanisima on AM radio exploding with accounts of how Castro took everything we had, how we’d get it back someday….
The sail had been drawn into an albino python hung vertically for the town to witness. The sea too shallow to dock. The boat its chipped purple belly remained somewhat distant solitary with only its static reflection. The fishermen swam to shore. Dark-brown sand their patterned trails to the plaza for rest. One wore a…
June. A white heat. Two schoolgirls with crisp collars tread home on a red road. Two young boys with crew cuts yawn in the third tank, blink from five hours sleep. Blue dragonflies, girlsweat, orange dust on Adidases… Green interior. Boysweat. A twist of knobs and dials. Down the…
Gone, the quiet of toads. We used to see them half-burrowed in the powdery dirt. I liked their eyes, the nictating membrane. They seemed wry, a little smug. Like a girl who is double-jointed. Demonstrating that. At recess. Gone the articles, how they coddled their nouns. Or, sometimes, volunteered them. Did I mention the car…
Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back. —Bruce Springsteen The bitter glue of snow makes the seven-hour trip take twelve. I’m crying—have been sobbing off and on for more than two days. I’m a pitiful, middle-aged mess. Goggles is in the trunk in a Hefty Bag and…
I shimmied my way up the thick vine like a cord plugged into heaven—electricity crackled down the line between my hands, reflexes tightening the fingers—I took it as a message from the gods, onwards! So up I went clapping hands ankles knees to the breeze as the cord arced left and right in the sky—…
Moments connect like iron filings on a magnet, Not by the clock moving forward But by likenesses of mood; the way the sun Strikes a plate glass window At dawn unites all such dawns, the way love Brightens the face of your lover after Even the briefest absence, the same Knotty dilemma, whether day or…
In her book, she said the guiding principle was guarding against irreparable losses; she’d managed to live so as to avoid any major cause of regret. Anyone who’s done that, raise your hand: you’re excused from this poem. As for us who remain, let’s go around the circle and list our regrets. For the stuporous,…
Corpses push up through thawing permafrost, as I scrape salmon skin off a pan at the sink; on the porch, motes in slanting yellow light undulate in air. Is Venus at dusk as luminous as Venus at dawn? Yesterday I was about to seal a borax capsule angled up from the bottom of a decaying…
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