Poetry

Lunch recess, a football tossed in the air, John paced the length of the fence as a small group of girls gathered to gossip about Duane and who he liked while John, wanting so much to connect, ran at them screaming “John germs,” touching Cindy’s back. When the football soared too high, John jumped up on a stone…

For Laurie Lago It’s an opulence often best manifested in the obituaries. Edward, for instance, for whom the most that could be said was a headline that he had been “A Lifetime Member of Costco.” Or that real daredevil Leo, whose very last words were “Watch this!”

I had only recently been set free—not from prison, but from something akin to it, a facility just as mean with a warden of a different sort. It could have been said of me that I was now out walking the streets. That’s what could have been said. In truth I was at home, glued…

Who was that girl in the maze, too busy being a needle to understand she was also an eye? All bothered heat. All light the underside of a storm cloud scraping the city with its silver. Some of her is left in me, slipped into the marrow, caged beneath ribs. Is she this blunt thumping?…

“It’s not a good disease to have,” my doctor says. I admire his grim honesty, I admire it greatly. “Indolent, but it usually does progress.” Which sounds about right for me. Two years of misdiagnosed torment and now this. I ask him about suicide. He nods. “It happens,” he says. When I tell him I’ve…

In which the receding sea makes Black Beach a mirror and I’m given another sky, where the green glass like a lozenge floats—rubbed rough and soft— and I feel after a long month of worry                     the sea reminding the shard: you’re sand. I roll the glass clean between my hands, dip it into a tidal…

Now my father cannot remember the name of the war he fought in seventy-some years ago. When I remind him, he becomes belligerent about a war that never really ended, and one that could start again. Not Korea, I know that much, son! It’s the war that starts with an M. To try and correct…

A baby green anole in the bathtub grips porcelain while I shower. Petrified survivalists, both, we drip. Used to stillness in downpours, it moves only when I pluck its body into my hands and bend a gentle cage. I’m saving you from me, I say. Soaked. A prehistoric face pokes between thumbs, a spell on…

Written in response to works in Description de l’Egypte From point A to point B            the longest distance is travelled by a financier             driven by his craving     for adventure             In the archive of the escapade the frontispiece shows Alexandria       framed by charioteers city-states to the east and west                a parade around the ruins      (The ouroboros represents infinity but…