Poetry

The kind Italian driver of the bus to Rome invited her to his house—she was obviously hungry—and gave her sandwiches and raped her. All those years ago—she smiles while telling it—contemptuous, somehow of her younger self, who drags behind her like a can. Grammar is great but who will write the sentence that includes the…

We’re in the middle of it, in the middle of the backyard barbecuing steak and chicken. Telling stories with our wives and girlfriends away, red and blue psychedelics, Coors Light and breasts falling into our mouths again like basalt cliffs into the sea. Jeremy says, I did CPR on a gorilla once. A girl gorilla,…

The sun was nothing more than an orange the day Lisa ran for the ice cream truck. It was small and even if it held sweetness, even if it seeped Vitamin C, it couldn’t stop the car from barreling down Mott Avenue, couldn’t shine enough to show the driver the eight-year-old girl dashing in front…

I go around and turn the pages—the newest news—for the paralytics on the porch. At least the day isn’t hot yet. So says only a gleam in an old man’s eye. A bee zeroes in for the kill. I roll the ladies to the shady side. No one wants word of war. They go for…

When I decide to go to hear Handel’s Messiah in London           at the composer’s parish church, my husband says he’d rather see a Thai horror movie, so we plan to meet later           at our favorite Moroccan lair that serves huge platters of olives and fried goat brains, but here I am sitting in the pew…

do you remember that bum you ran into in the bathroom of the Radisson washing himself with a rag his clothes in a pile in the corner he must have been in his sixties all smiles and still retarded by his father’s rage oh this man he said the things he did to me and…

Valium, Librium, and Tylenol with codeine—that’s what Velma           the head nurse at the Florida House of Representatives would dish out when you came in with your period, a hangover,           a cold, a broken arm, a hangnail. She called it the Triple, as in It sounds like you need a Triple or That calls for a…

Your grandfather and I walk alike, each of us counting the brittle spaces in getting older. At the desk I explain I want to see my son, and I see you are now digits on a sheet. Black men in black—the brothers—make sure you obey the rules. It is like the times I had to…

When I saw her in her urban kitchen— thin and smart in her charity-shop green dress— a glass wall was between us polished spotless with some soft cloth of mistrust. All winter she’d lived up the hill in the gray house with the damp walls, the rains fading the fields. The snow— its ice-floe memories…