As a child I was radiant. The land grew irradiated corn and roses, tomatoes large and abundant. Swallows and catfish carrying the isotopes into the water and woods. The sun rose each day, while the shadows of trees concealed government laboratories where my father worked. I grew up listening to the tap click of the…
The basement floods, but he doesn’t mind. He’s busy as the hundreds of workers you never see in his prints of Inland Steel, those mills that don’t have windows saying the dark is all there is, like Monopoly houses, and blast furnaces, oil tanks and ladders white as lighthouses. Everyone you never see so focused….
It’s the nut house in my imagination. Why Mom and Dad put him away is a mystery. Something about leaving home so you can see it better. He takes a seat in the empty hall. Write about home, they tell him. Once in a blue moon we meet him for dinner down the block…
Do you remember the two types of eternity, how we learned about them in a Wegmans parking lot, when you turned on the radio, the classical channel? Why were they even talking about eternity, what did it have to do with the suddenly broody guitars? You had a peach Snapple, I remember…
Let us admit there has been division enough; our teeth, its simplest actors. Let us admit the past—our translucent bodies’ betrayal: good natures’ good windows. We were, weren’t we, moveable? Series of solid matters sected. Mid-life and un-mothered, historical warnings hum, “Don’t split the pole—” so as not to forget oneself so as…
I too have had my hands full of what keeps me contained, a vastness softened by restraint and made more terrible because of it. I think it’s time we talk about the safety of distance, how the tire tread of rush hour traffic sounds like something being patiently worn down, how the cars parked along…
On reprieve from the rain but not the heat— we watch it gather like flowers or the men who build a house in fits & starts across the street. They saw & nail what I can’t see—a coffin cut to measure, or wedding dress sewn closed along the pinked seams….
Of us there is always less. The days hammer past, artificial daisies at the grave. Words I didn’t choose for my father’s headstone & those that came instead to live around my neck, dog tags a tin pendulum on my chest. On my mother’s side, my cousin, too young, dirt a…
What does the water want? Enters where it is not welcome, jacks up the foundation uneven & splits the wood like a look— it rusts it rusts rusts the roof through— drops by unannounced when your house a mess, rifles through Mama’s drawers, papers, borrows books for weeks & returns…
No products in the cart.