There were helicopters in the earth and they rose and flew through the earth each morning they flew into our flowerpots our balconies As they circle over us, right next to us, their iron boxes with propellers shine Sonya sticks her fingers she’s putting her fingers she shovels her fingers in my gums me to…
When you go to your favorite grocery store and this week’s Special is boneless pork tenderloin that you’ll roll in a floured paste with cracked pepper and rosemary before you roast it in a hot oven and serve it with homemade pear chutney do you visualize up to twenty wet pink piglets squirming out of…
Like a river at night, her hair, the sky starless, streetlights glossing the full dark of it: Was she Jewish? I was seventeen, an “Afro-American” senior transferred to a suburban school that held just a few of us. And she had light-brown eyes and tight tube tops and skin white enough to read by…
Almost ready, she says as I walk into the drugstore, this strange woman who swivels her neck, to cock her head back at me, while adjusting her bra under her clothes, and I don’t know if she means the rapture, or if she’s waiting for some violence, tires squealing, to drag her off by her…
He almost pitied them, those buried with no fare, as he sifted through the sand of their names and singled out the shades who would be granted no passage. Their breath was all cold-packed earth and mossy hush. How many coins he had now—the wake turned up their light when he fingered them. He tallied…
What with foresight and dancing, gypsies would seem to pass easily between worlds. The hummingbird too— only a moth with a beak— Have I ever heard it hum? Yet it’s everywhere welcome, coaxed by red flowers, even sugar water, for we are devious, in our desires. And the dead, we embody them for our own…
The road is impassable, a shelf on the side of a mountain the wind keeps sweeping clear to fill with possessions for the new year: fresh snow, and the North Country light that Polaris, king of hunger and the shivering animals, king of branches that snap in the cold, sends as its indifferent benediction. King…
for Memory and Oxford “Apart from her roles as wife and mother, Doris did not play a large part in the stories of Greek mythology.” —anonymous online source She was a type, all right, an Okie from her daddy’s side, when she met Nereus, maybe even a little flashy looking, the bright…
after James Agee that couple on the road could no more slow their hearts, slough their fear than could you doff your privilege, un- lace the corset of skin that cuts you to the quick so here you are in the thick of it the sun-bleached air the hard-scrabble beauty of…
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