All winter, I sent letters to old friends turned strangers,ghosts, representations of other eras, statues & facades. I spoke of sobriety & struggle. I spoke of fatherhood& a new masculine energy tended in the intimacy of a circle of other initiated men. Who am I trying to impress?My teenage son calls everybody bro, even me….
Or try toKnowing someday everyone I love will dieI’m practicing Not for death butTo love the labor of my human life Who canTreasure the broken bone and dishThe house in flame or flood andWhat it takes to fix I take insteadNotes from smaller sufferingsOnce waking in a guestroom beside the baby disappointedTo be missing a party…
Again, you are the church of what separates wrestlingand professional wrestling. A little money, a lot of folding chairs.What separates knowing how to speak a language and knowinghow to play an instrument is smaller than the differencebetween the blood on my shirt being mine or someone else’s.The French are allowed sincerity, which separates themfrom the…
A memorial erected over a void. Usuallyfor a living person who just vanished, butwhose death seems indisputable. Begin with a shovel, an empty rectangularcake of earth. Begin with a word, a grail to extinguish all hope. Begin with the storyof a child disappearing between his fifth-grade class and the bus stop—baseball bat and glovediscarded on…
“Being Property Once Myself. I have a feeling for it …”—Lucille Clifton
I never saw my mother hold her husband’s hand or stroke his blue-blazered shoulder.Compliments were reserved for thin women and handsome priests. London and her lasttwo houses brought brightness to her eyes. Her greatest affection she savedfor a succession of Scotties, a breed known to be aloof. Each one she fed into obesity,half her plate scraped into the dog’s…
There is nowhere for the wind to blow through the grassthe way it blows through words to make them prayer. Not here. Not after harvest, just stems left,and seed pods, and leaves. All of it a wick as wide as there is landscape. Some farmers burn their fields,and the fire is a fist perpetually closing,…
rockets and rocks, dingbats,all-nite coffee and gas-ups, flyingsaucers and neon Welcome to Los Vegas, starburstsand steel beams, boldupsweeps: a future. She wants to be atomicand glass, Hollywoodand Jetsons, wants a future beyond this pastconstantly hardeningin her path. Every time she makessomeone stone, theymonument, outlast her— and when she looksout of the glassand watches parking lots…
arrived suddenly, left suddenly.In between, we stalked each other, omen to omen, panting.One of us bore a gold cuff around her neck. One of us sportedblack stockings. Each breath coated our chests in fear—anythingcould happen. Any second could turn on you, twist—uncatchable. Soon I faced nothing but crushed salvia, bent grass.That skinny, sharp-toothed creature vanished…
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