Poetry

Amped-up grid lights growl stars onto the hay-baled dirt ring onto blistered chrome and rust-lace, car-shells taped and painted over to resemble shapes of cars. We’re bleachered, gum-shoed, bleached by glare, laughing at ourselves for being here, spilling beer and sponging powdered sugar from our rumpled shirt-fronts, smiling. Rumbles in the air, our guts, the…

is another thing Nietzsche said that hits me as pretty specious, if not entirely untrue, while sitting in my car in the Costco parking lot, listening to the Ballet Mécanique of metal buggies shrieking as each super, singular, and self-contained wisdom of this Monday morning rumbles its jumbo packs of toilet paper and Diet Coke…

I shall speak of the tendency among sane and healthy persons to see images flash unaccountably into existence.                      —Francis Galton   This is a tale not of science but of blue. Some say this heat is the worst in history, but history is huge and I doubt it has never been hotter across the Northern…

I’m resting on a bench in the cemetery while Ned scrawls his self-delighted wild-boy trace over the slopes of grass, but we can’t stay long, since it’s a day I need to go into the city, and when I stand up suddenly my left leg’s half a foot lower than my right, because I’ve stepped…

When I hit thirteen, the noun between my legs turning into a verb, my father sat me down and said: one day you will have a wife of your own. A man will come—a helpful neighbor knocking while you’re at work perhaps, or a garlicky colleague at an office party, or a lifeguard on a…

Marked by Apollo with a red coin on the forehead, this one still waits, solitary, uncoupled on extraordinary legs, not gull-like or chicken-like, not tree-clinging or perching. He dreams a wet return to the sand flats and shallows of the Blackjack Peninsula, of flying over lands with mutual wing easing their flight as in Paradise…

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…