Poetry

Ugly is prettygeneric (there’s enough to go around),a name flung from the mirror I duck,but I hear what it says: Your living is complete defiance. All of this was foretold in my history, shapedby storefront living in my latchkey world. My ugly is alive like a plague bredon maternal distance & rage, on a fatheritching…

Here’s how I explain it: my body       has had an umbrella     open for the last 910 days               no, it hasn’t rainedat all but I like to be prepared      & I like to be untouched  /   I might carry this un-superstitionwith me forever      yes, like a child      yes, I was terrifiedafter the election       yes, I was…

Still it feels shitty, filling a grave. To raise dirtby the spade-full, just piling it on. Our task: plug a holethat holds my best friend’s dad, pack distance between a corpse and all it cared for. That the rabbi refers to itas a final kindness—a mitzvah—seems amiss, like a doorheld open to a room where…

It was summer. I was small. My uncleplunked me into his pickup to keep him companyon his run for more beer. I was glad to go.He was a loud, belching man who killed bugsfor a living. My father’s brother, with three golden teeth.I recall the calm sun, yellow and smeared.The smell of grill-smoke as he…

A certain holy, the black nylon straps becoming funeral dress.  My body, a white shroud  draped over yours. We make  two definitions of the word  bury & let them both lead us to forget. Your old name,  thrashed down my throat.  Replaced with spitslick & stiff  mythology of rubber. My breath scented like a car crash, copper  rain & tires scuffed into shadow. We celebrate the last…

As a child I was radiant.The land grew irradiated corn and roses,tomatoes large and abundant. Swallows and catfishcarrying the isotopes into the water and woods.The sun rose each day, while the shadowsof trees concealed government laboratorieswhere my father worked.I grew up listening to the tap clickof the Geiger counter. I grew up listeningto clicks on…

The basement floods, but he doesn’t mind.He’s busy as the hundreds of workers you never seein his prints of Inland Steel, those millsthat don’t have windows saying the darkis all there is, like Monopoly houses,and blast furnaces, oil tanks and ladderswhite as lighthouses. Everyone you never seeso focused. Everywhere you look, bright gravelswept into mounds…

It’s the nut house in my imagination.Why Mom and Dad put him awayis a mystery. Something about leavinghome 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 dinnerdown the block from the place they call a home,which…

Do you remember the two types of eternity, how we learnedabout them in a Wegmans parking lot, when you turned on the radio, the classical channel? Whywere they even talking about eternity, what did it have to do with the suddenlybroody guitars? You had a peach Snapple, I remember the snappy kissy sound of the…