Poetry

Laundry Day

All one needs to belong to the company Of the truly grateful is to feel grateful, Just as I felt when, retrieving a sock This afternoon from behind the dryer, I found the book you lent me Four years ago, two years before your heirs Sold off your library. Did you ever wonder What had…

The Blower of Leaves

Today I bow to the power of negative space, the beauty of what’s missing—the hard work of yard work made harder without you, while the stiff kiss of acorns puckers the ground. I am a fool. Even as the red impatiens wither and brown, they are still lovely. I feed the gaping mouths of lawn…

Shadowboxing Herons

for the Wu Tang Clan and 1992   Shaolin’s flowers, imperial and ready for slaughter. Bobby Digital wears the wings of the only saint he knows. Come blessed angel with your skull-cup of blood. Enter this chamber with your black sword and a streetcar full of flagging desire. When the children ask for water, give…

John Henryism

The Day of Pentecost came without the usual ladder of tongues. The spike, driven through our white-bread boned shirts into our bare melon hearts, remained dry. The locusts, slung low in the trees, remained in our breath. The prophet, robed in wind, remained lost in the wilderness. The scarves about our heads. Something like a…

The Big Sleep

Read it on the Greyhound back before I saw Bogart in Marlowe’s clothes, before the old man bought the Buick, before he changed to dust, before my mother scattered him along the highway to Lake Mead beside a scrubby desert tree. Before I didn’t buy the whiskey, before I didn’t hoist a glass, before I…

Clip Clop

from the balcony of footpaths speak of the black horse & the dead rider how old the mirror is which brings with it spirits like tracks filled with basil from where you stand sing an antique song let your arms veinless hang by your side wait for the gypsy who took your life away you…

(from)

(Where the woman in the iron lung breathes out every person she’s ever met, a big breath, like it’s cold and she’s pretending to smoke.)   I said     I’m dead you put blankets on my iron lung    said Must be cold    you’re always cold    Dead I said again   you said…

Nada

What a name to call your sister—Nada: Nothing—word I’d learned in Spanish, where d sounds like th, Natha, two-thirds of the way to Nathalie where, in French, the th sounds like t, as in Nativity: Birth, the opposite of Nothing, though all who are born return to it. Nada—the word contagious, even Mom fizzing laughter…