Poetry

  • Cynthia La’Gail

    Think I don’t know nothing.Child.Stopped kissing me goodnightwhen she turned fourteen.Well.Every good thingturn to glass.Then break.She ratherstay away.Got my nose.Eyes, too.When she was little,they called her Lil Gail.Bet she don’t remember.She so busywriting things.Don’t tell your businessin front of Tameka.She will put it in a poem.She better notwrite nothingabout me.I rememberwhen I had her.Two and…

  • Smith’s Supermarket, Taos, New Mexico, at the Fifteen Items or Less Checkout Line

    The baby-faced cholo in front of megently drops a divider bar betweenwhat’s his and mine. On my side, a six-outlet surgeprotector for my computer,and a fireproof glass cupfor my Lux Perpetua candle,a votive so powerfulit self-destructs. On his,a plastic bottle of store-brand vodka.It’s noon, but somewhereit’s happy hour. Baseball cap bad-ass backwards.Black leather from neck…

  • They Came

    For the families of the deceased buried in Jewish Cemeteries desecratedsince January of 2017 They came with small rocksand pebbles to place on the holy groundwhere gravestones had been turned over and desecrated.They came with their relatives’ plot numbersscribbled on scraps of paper.They came with tears in their eyes,they came with their memories andgrief unfurling…

  • The Underworld

    I watch the little weasel rise just partlyout of a cleft in earth, its facea periscope at sea, this way and that but not slow asan owl does it, the moon behind himin old children’s books, his giant tufted headturning full circle and rich with pause.Because the weasel isn’t patient. It’s all frenzy.Through weeds, another…

  • Still Life with Helicopters

    Almost two thousand years before Da Vinciimagined a machine whose screwlike overhead motor could lift the machine into vertical flight,children in China played with bamboo toys whose propellers, thin and light as dragonflywings, were set on a sharpened stick and spun into the wonder of an object spiraling in the air.The toys were brought back…

  • Verbascum

    Taller than a manpitched from the earthgarbled needleblackened nowits volute screedbee- and beetle-riddenup and down betweenthe un-sprung buds, the wildefficient feel ofsmockedrabbit-skinnedexplosionspoised so slowlyon its undertakingthat it was so longbeing truethe cold and the craftlesswas not craftspotting the nichesthe leaves thexanthene core.