Desire for the good deal, the hot need to look slick, wordless advertisement for the invisible product, I release you like the dumpster behind the cafeteria releases these long, festering rivers of milk. Fear of death, fear of narrow spaces, love of the wine-red mole that punctuates the transaction-inspiring cleavage of Jill, my credit union…
The cookies his neighbors brought by didn’t taste like pity— at my father’s house for the first time, after, the locks broken into, now new, when cross the street comes a neighbor, cookies shrouded in tinfoil, a plate I need not return. How long had the pair kept vigil out the window for someone to…
Because there’s no end to cruelty, Lyle ties half a brick to a hen’s foot, climbs the ladder up the water tower where waits Tony—together, they toss their weighted hens into space: the flung chicken that charts its course across clear air, fans its…
Like grass in rain, my dead grow at an amazing rate. Meet me, won’t you, I’ve managed to lose the key. Death, you’ve outdone yourself. The lawn a little lake.
When Shirley Weems submarines her Barbie in the shallows, spooking the catfish while her brother and me sit on upturned buckets with cane poles on our side of the pond not bothering anybody, I note how the light around Shirley seems so rosy, all a-twinkle with its own self-contained Shirley music. I pick a dirt…
A basket in the shape of a sunflower— still hanging on your bedroom wall. You made it in school. You loved it so much you wouldn’t stop making it. Or couldn’t stop. We don’t agree, on what you said. But I was your favorite. I thought, What kind of boy makes such a basket? Professional…
Some say the Army and some the Marines and some say the Air Force is the greatest sight sweeping over this crippled earth but I say love for example a wedding the bride’s face hidden as though no longer hers to share and the sound of wailing oh, Anaktoria what have they done the soldiers…
and I answer by driving around, which seems to me the most American of activities, up there with waving the incendiary dandelion of sparklers or eating potato salad with green specks of relish, the German kind, salad of immigrants, of all the strange pickled bits we carry over from other places, like we did on…
a father has lost his son. He circles shoe racks, lingerie, dressing rooms, calling out “Marco!…Marco!…” We all want to help, but it’s just too much: Oh, the tragedy of naming then losing a son named Marco— born to love and to wander, whole head submerged in the starched cup of an outsized Playtex bra,…
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