Poetry

The featured pop star’s voice was too big for the waterfront pavilion. That’s what the reviewer said. Her recent poignant hit flew overhead, drifted right out the open sides  of the white tent, somehow tugging us with it, flinging us toward starswhere we hung briefly before landing among jellyfish and buoys. Once we were part of the water,…

After seven nights of silence, he woke to seven drawingsof a ram, pinned along his walls. Spit six seeds in a tin cup and trailed his hands along the white hallsinging about something to do with morning. My father sat his easel in the musicaland was a farmer, but wanted to be a painter. When…

What have you done?Opened this box of sound,warped like sand beneath water,remember that? The wavesof perception moving youaway from me. We grow farther apart,but we are equal in our ignoranceof how. No change there. Like celestialbodies distancing—like the animalsin autumn. How? This knowledge,how will you pin it down?How hard I look to trace the first…

Billie, I told the Devil not to let you into Hell.It’s where you think you’re going soon, when at last that golden horse’s hooves runroughshod over your heart. No, you have your own heat, a heady steam off your scalp. Before you,I hated my smell, like his fingertips after stealing a girl from her mother’s…

Who was that girl in the maze, too busy being a needleto understand she was also an eye? All bothered heat. All lightthe underside of a storm cloud scraping the city with its silver. Some of her is left in me, slipped into the marrow, cagedbeneath ribs. Is she this blunt thumping? And if sowhere…

“It’s not a good disease to have,” my doctor says.I admire his grim honesty, I admire itgreatly. “Indolent, but it usually does progress.”Which sounds about right for me.Two years of misdiagnosed tormentand now this. I ask him about suicide.He nods. “It happens,” he says.When I tell him I’ve seriously considered it,he says my disease would…

Lunch recess, a football tossed in the air,John paced the length of the fence as a small group of girls gathered to gossipabout Duane and who he liked while John, wanting so much to connect, ran at themscreaming “John germs,” touching Cindy’s back. When the football soared too high, John jumpedup on a stone wall, losing his footing, impaling…

For Laurie Lago It’s an opulence oftenbest manifested in the obituaries.Edward, for instance, for whomthe most that could be saidwas a headline that he had been“A Lifetime Member ofCostco.” Or that real daredevilLeo, whose very last wordswere “Watch this!”

I had only recently been setfree—not from prison, butfrom something akin to it, a facility just as meanwith a warden of a differentsort. It could have been said of me that I was now outwalking the streets. That’swhat could have been said. In truth I was at home,glued to my computer,at it again, conversing this…