Poetry

The boy could sometimes see, could sense his father’s fondness for a thing. One Christmas he spurned comic books, penciled “shotgun” on his list to prove he’d moved beyond the tin cans and the .22. En route to the rite of deer, perhaps hunt birds…like tiny planes; safe in a blind, he’d take his time…

Bored, I open the back of an ancient clock And the minutes pile out, Exhausted from spinning Out the same hammered seconds. The minutes stagger on the table And collapse, for they are dizzy, For they have realized they have no legs, For the surface of the table is flat And what have they known…

What one thinks to hold Is what one thinks to know, So comes of simple hope And leads one on. The others there the same With no one then to blame These flowered circles handed. So each in turn was bonded. There the yellow bees will buzz, And eyes and ears appear As listening, witnessing…

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…