Poetry

  • Eye Surgery

    First a warm blanket and a voice called Joy. Then oxygen, a faint smell, and a finger monitor.   A stick at the wrist and pressure, a clear-coil tube. Then a voice called Tan and something pumped.   And a thick paper packet like a vest with an eye hole. Then nothing but every-colored wallpaper…

  • Mortal Enemy

    One afternoon last week, I was sitting at my kitchen table, doing an online search for Bobby Bocelli. What came up was an entry headed: Robert A. Bocelli, 54, journalist, novelist, play and screenwriter. It sounded like an obituary. My second feeling was shame and guilt about my first feeling, which had been a flash…

  • The Émigré Engineer

    Dedicated to the one who “blew the minutest kiss with the barest movement of her lips”   1 The Revolution Comes on Horses When Witold Galitzki was in his late teens, the Revolution happened in Russia. People in Witold’s Galician village agreed that it was the business of Russians, and that they could keep it….

  • The Mexican Detective

    My sister’s body was found twelve days after her birthday, which was the last time I’d seen her. The silence of the interval was nothing extraordinary; we didn’t have reason to speak, and the older we got, the more reason we needed. Our family, like any other, had a certain tension built into it. Falling-outs…

  • The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs

    Cañon City was not a city. It was a small, gossiping, high-security town in Colorado’s high desert, bordered to the west by the Sawatch Range. A home rule municipality boasting thirteen prisons and fifty churches, its ten thousand people—one fifth of them locked up—governed themselves as they saw fit and thrived on the stories, true…

  • Blood

    after Bobby Chacon     if you see it down the side of my face leave me alone if you see it in my eyes come take a look it’s difficult to rub blood out of your eye & block left hooks at the same time

  • Defense

    —after Bobby Chacon only criminals                     fight for money           are committed                   to this thing to get money                                       to get enough                     to serve seven years                             & I’ve paid                          & I didn’t have the money                            the kids                               for my crimes if I didn’t have                  to serveto get money                     my family                             I’d fight                            for the money                    another ten years                                                                          I paid for my…

  • It Was Just an Opening

    after Bobby Chacon that’s all it was                                                            just fighting out of my head                                                            doing whatever it took to reach him                                                            there was no real plan it was whatever it took                                                            fighting him was it all fighting no head                                                            just to reach that’s all no head just doing                                                            my plan fighting to reach out of my head                                                            fighting to reach him doing it…