When I change lanes on I-70 North toward the St. Louis airport, my father points to my sideview mirrors and asks how I like them angled. He tells me he keeps his tilted to show only a trace of his car, a shadow, enough to see where it ends and the asphalt picks up. And…
That’s how much time they give you to bribe the hall of records for the paperwork you bribe the foreman to sign, swearing you know nothing and owe nothing—no loans, no debts before you bribe a woman to sell your pots and pans, plates, plants, rugs, and record player, so you can bribe a dentist…
for TP The woman down the hall has a girlfriend. When they fell in love the sea was a finger. It pushed them both in the belly. It rubbed their lips. It ran itself up and down their thighs. Then they got married. The sea came to the wedding and ate the shrimp cocktail. Had…
Before she told me, she let me finish my dinner. I can still see the pinkish cream sauce blossoming on the china. I didn’t know yet if I could walk when I pushed myself back from the table. This is what gets me: I didn’t throw the stained dish against the wall. I slipped the…
A poem about “Still Life with Fruit, Wine, Glasses, and a Bowl of Cherries,” by Hendrik van Streek, can’t stay in the painting for long unless it takes a closer look at the blue bowl holding the cherries and wonders, as the wall label wonders, whether that’s Chinese porcelain shipped to Europe by the Dutch…
He takes the bones of a pony, a pot of Earl Grey tea, a paintbrush and what remains of the body where his students learned, for years, to name the parts, saying ulna, radius, tibia, skull. Saying femur, sternum, pelvis, clavicle. Is this not how god made Eve and Adam, more or less? The one…
The child imitating a dragonfly zoomed into the dusty elms and came back a child. The child mocking a firefly lit and went out until he was invisible. In honor of night the child closed his eyes. The child pretending to be a child burned to grow old, soon he wept in dry coughs. Always…
I pick the lock of every knock in the night or rasp of leaves until I hear his voice as it was in life. Even when I want the past as charred as these pine logs gasping for air in the stove, heartwood turned to cinder no hand can make whole again, I say grace…
Is poetry ruining my life, I wonder, upstairs in a house with more windows than walls where I am trying to write or read it. Downstairs “Lady in the Dark,” complete with dialogue, too loud, and the purr of my husband’s snore. I feel a fume coming on, kindling for an inferior rage that will…
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