My mother has never died yet.My father has died oh so many years ago.I have never died yet though I have not died from trying.What is the most profound tragedy that can befall a family?And the dream answered: The death of the primary wage-earner.My sister has never died yet though she believes she has been…
a delicate box. The child inside it. It’s okay to not think abouthow the child came to be in the box. It’s okay to focus solelyon what the child offers: the sound of fireweed bending in wind,yesterday’s pages torn from their binding, a small hand. Yesterdaythere was no sign of the child. No warning between…
“What’s for you won’t go by you,” he told me, the great, recalcitrant songwriter so heavy-browed with doubt and kindness. I was eighteen and had taken a Greyhound from New York to Nashville to find him, my corduroys indistinguishable from my self. That whole wolf-on-skates year his music had saved me, made me feel something…
I found a boat tied upat the water’s edge,rocking, rope frayed, oarsbanging in their locks. At home, you neverknew what mighthappen. A surprisea minute, they say. In the distancedark clouds, no traceof the other shore.It might have been wise to havebrought a compassand life jacket,to have packed a lunch.
We’d only just begun to scratch the floors with our own furniture, unfold the box flaps and hang the walls to look like our walls in the old apartment: familiar faces, fruits. Then we heard it, the long scrapes in deep grooves overhead. It came from the devil’s peak, after we’d turned the bedroom into the samedark as the…
Neighbors smuggle the sunthrough tunnelsbeneath the houses.The smoke of bombsdropped from the F-16shas covered the city’s sky.
At my first history class,the only students attendingare the future, the present, and the past.As I step in, the future gets ready to leave,while the past straddles the present,handcuffing it,severing its hamstrings,and dyeing its clothes gray.
She did not play horsey on the hardwoodfloor. She did not neigh, nor did she whinny.She had some things she wanted to write down:something about her father and his gunsand his alcohol and her trite love for himthat never got to pale in comparisonto the blooming chest-fire she would have feltif she ever held her…
Don’t let me end up a mural on Bryant St.Sound of a cheap lighter heating a joint. Hiss like deep inhale from a fresh joint,large worries can be made small with a mouth. Large worries made small in Sunday’s mouth:aunties’ lips while they sing, victory is mine I dream and sing, victory, today, is mine,eye…
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