Poetry

Faces loom and eclipse under heaven’s attentive glare. Hieroglyph eyebrows. Burnished cheek. Dark scribble of beard. He wants to know: How far can you see into me by the roar of this morning’s light? The surface of his lips like the thirsty surface of sandstone or granite. Am I becoming statuary? he asks. Then let…

My dresses huddle in their closet. No histrionics, no tears. They’re undaunted, unhaunted, since you disappeared. Torture by laundry and mothball is all I can offer them, though it’s Christmas. And despite the holiday, there’s endless wrestling on tv. Is that your nudge to me: toughen up and roll with the punches? Here on earth,…

He held my hand on the ride from El Centro past the sugar beet plant     its smell of dying   frogs like the ones we’d dissected in biology lab      the formaldehyde on my fingers   for days     the way lettuce smelled like slicing      or tomatoes     little hearts     They formed a white   mountain     the sugar hulls     sweet climbing hill gated     & locked…

The Houston nightclub, long shut down, where I once spent Friday nights.   Someone shoots up Heaven, both bars and the small dance floor in the back. But the patrons, all just my memories now, ethereal, wisps of smoke and soul, don’t notice or care. The bullets spray through them where they cluster at the…

Fooling around, witnesses said, the man pushing his friend off the dock  with his foot when he couldn’t wake him up. Svedka bottle back and forth  all afternoon, the one passed out, the other working him, cajoling, needling, wheedling, that if he didn’t wake up, wake up right now, he was going  to push him in,…

I The woman who had the job before I had the job was supposed to train me for a month. That was the plan. I would start in July and she would leave in August and we would, like waves, or words, or worries, overlap. But my contract was caught up in an air conditioned…

Suboxone—illusory, nomadic, practical; the lighter with a sunset on the ledge, the roominess of midnights in small towns nodding out. All this I like. The cigarette stubbed out on the rearview mirror—this too I like. The little things: Cars lined up at seven a.m. before the gate to see the meteor crater has opened. Ruins…

A homeless woman at the reference desk asked, “Am I an angel, or merely a supernatural creature?” She was agitated, all the muscles of her narrow face in nervous motion, and I was too startled to answer. A man I worked with, who often ignored patrons for his own reading, rose and stepped forward to stand…

The dogs in the neighborhood are barking. At the end of his lead our young dog stalls in darkness between yards and digs in his two-year weight. He has a scent— God is in the garden. I crouch and point my light.   Characters run across yards with pumpkin buckets and faces in masks or…