Poetry

In a waiting room at the Kresge Eye Center, my fingers trace the outline of money folded into pocket and I know the two hundred fifty dollars there is made up of two hundred forty-five I can’t afford to spend but will spend on a calm voice to tell me how I am to be…

This endless room is deep blue, dark red. I’m wearing my Valentino gown, vintage silhouette but hand-stitched for me. It’s the same purple as my favorite twilight, just as I requested. Everyone is here—I can see across the way the black-rooted starlets and reality queens drinking acai Cosmos. And I can see the disgraced congressman…

I shouldn’t be, but I’m thinking About the woman who got shot Fighting over that sweat-soaked Headscarf Teddy Pendergrass threw Into the crowd at one of those Shows he put on for “Ladies Only” the year I was born. How Many women reached Before the tallest two forgot Their new fingernails matched Purses and shoes?…

Between mud walls and the kiva wind off the mesa broke his phrases, as we walked with Billy of the Parrot Clan and with others. The windows melting into blowing snow and the ripped- off split-level doors jammed on the adobes. Out of fleeting blue, then white, we caught bites about the time of killing…

Describing her, I say, she’s a Modigliani face-wise but when she walks in her custom-size narrow boots she minces, or half-dances like a pony, the sort of pony who is dear and a little silly and wears a hat with a ribbon. A little of this and a little of that—lacking a territorial integrity, she…

I loved to walk down to the café where she worked and stare at the menu with the Brains Beurre Noir halfway down the page. She’d come to my table with her order pad, pleasant and placid, dressed all in white like a nurse, and her wonderful smell, strong and female, would enter me like…

The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts. No one hides a Tommy gun in its case. No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage. The last of the Hawai’ian queens translated the name gift that came here, while Portuguese historians translate jumping flea, the way a player’s fingers pick and fly. If…

Even the gods misuse the unfolding blue. Even the gods misread the windflower’s nod toward sunlight as consent to consume. Flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone. Still, you envy the horse that draws their chariot. The wilting mash of air alone keeps you from scaling Olympus with gifts of dead or dying things…

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…