Poetry

               I answer the phone. After the usual delay, no telemarketing hum but a male-voiced “Gotcha, gotcha a little bit.” His tone is practiced. It boasts he’s finalized everything that needed saying. Here in me to be jeered at is the thing we’ve all got coming that may not…

Skinny printed boards half ad, half measurement, they came home with dad from businesses he visited, their names and numbers and Lowest Prices! slogans branded into cheap wood like on giveaway pencils. Lightweight, I’d wield one as a bat, a sword, a club: if it splintered, no problem, there were plenty of trees and we…

Somewhere on I-5, in the flash of hazard lights, I was broken-down. But it seemed enough to have light. The piano playing itself in the hall needs tuning, its notes ghostly and bent in the half-light. Tennis shoes and tin cans tied to the car the couple rushed out toward, struck by rice and the…

Skin of a plum. Rotting tooth. Switches cut down by a child to lash a child’s legs. A siege does something like this against sturdy walls. The wrong rules. A dozen angel figurines flying from a balcony. Flailing fist. Splint. Forefinger and index, dislocated, not broken. One points to the left of a man and…

Your sister’s inside in a green gown and you, here, twisting your dread into origami tissues, riot mind ticking wrong wrong, you’ve crashed your mooring, fear every wart, organ, every minor— what’s this pain in my groin? Is this what’s been waiting all along? All of us carried off on a train, pressed to a…

Nobody judges clumsiness, and nothing about                  wounded animals makes me weep,                  but something about a woman with eyelashes like broken wings, about a woman                  wearing leopard print who wears the smell of death, languidly    awaiting    a predator…

  His superpower was achieving the world’s first happy marriage by wedding his daughter, whom he loved at first sight i.e., when she was adopted at the age of 6 by the woman he was wooing & whose inevitability in the girl’s life led him to stick around until the girl was a preteen, a…

It’s unincorporated, but there’s a place in Kentucky called Burning Springs, a few knobby hills and a stream and the smell of rotten eggs in the air. An unlikely place for paradox, but there it is, mysteriously, the ground is oozing paradox. If it was ever the scene of valor it’s unrecorded, which I prefer….

If the express should slow and then suddenly stop and sit utterly still for minutes on end and all talk stop and no one question the stillness, no voice announce what, if anything, is about to transpire (odd word, that, for me, “transpire,” out of Latin “to go out into breath” or air or nothing),…