Praise scissors that clip split ends easily as ex- boyfriends. The one who died in college, the refugee who crossed a blood-soaked Nile, but never could get over you. Praise coffee and Kentucky bourbon. Daughters pulled deep into Ohioan corn, romances banished to backseats and barstools, and newlyweds two-stepping to the second line waving paper…
I flick a switch—out flashes the light bulb, like God snapping his fingers in my face: Wake up, Pumpkinhead. I’ve been running around half-naked, with the rest of America, wearing only a credit card and a cashmere scarf. Arf, arf. Yesterday, I went to Circuit City’s going-out-of-business sale to revel in the fall of capitalism,…
Before they put Cousin Gladys inside the ground in a cornrow of fair-skinned Creole men, I sat in her funeral mass imagining two shadows dancing in the swish of a swift moving blade that slit her dreams in half and sent her father strolling across the cane field like a land-bending river, turning a page…
Did you ever see stars? asked my father with a cackle. He was not speaking of the heavens, but the white flash in his head when a fist burst between his eyes. In Brooklyn, this would cause men and boys to slap the table with glee; this might be the only heavenly light we’d ever…
At the airport the conveyor bears small yachts shaped like luggage into the distance, and I am headed, when they let me pass through the X-ray arch, toward home. There is a distance sometimes greater than this between us, since you are in another state—gaseous, solid, liquid, light—and I admit I am often absent lately…
for Linda Gregg Safe in the light along the bank Being in believing No name Only being On the bank radiant and blank Safe watching and seeing On the brink Of the light Blank No blame in being Waiting then breathing in being Seeing Singing Let my voice …
By wings whose shapes are but half a heart? Feathers oiled with country clubs and gasps of delight? Not for these the sandhill crane shakes her beaded voice. Gauche and gangrene, she is the gatekeeper of gibe, a cement-gray song edged and pocked in grassy fields, a frock of scarlet over her eye, her own…
(A small, and still isolated, incident in New York shows what can happen if authentic authority in social relations has broken down to the point where it cannot work any longer even in its derivative, purely functional form. A minor mishap in the subway system—the doors on a train failed to operate—turned into a serious…
we are not asked to see, the ridged folds of the black walnuts, fallen, come veined as any mind split from its skull, leaching what little parades as peace. Rot and wet. My right instep, sneaker’s underneath, crushes a once greener skin gone brackish at the cap. Looking up, the branches meet in an arch…
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