Poetry

Update

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,…

Plan B

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…

Heaven

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…

Watertown Man Charged with Manslaughter in the Drowning Death of His Best Friend

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,…

The Budget of the Soul

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…

Pavlov was the Son of a Priest

which is a biographical fact only ever stated when discussing a man of either unrivaled righteousness or extreme wickedness. Imagine this: He never once used a bell in his saliva experiments, unless you count the plink of kibble falling from his dogs’   surgically opened throats, and why would you want to count that? I…