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 serve to get money                     my family                               I’d…

  • 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…