Poetry

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…

The hurricane’s advance team of breezes administers a poll to my oak trees. The author, having scented disaster, having been awake for hours, advises his trees not to answer. Telephones trill on nightstands, requiring weary authorities to sit on the edges of their beds with their heads in their hands as instructed by disaster movies….

If torture is the Queen of Truth then what is the King of Truth? Could it be the Black Dog, ennui, accidia, can the King rule by the weight of the ink (oh, I pray not the pixels!) on an execution order? Could the King be numbed by dum-dum fever? Could the King be a…

This audience is dressed in the old clothes and humiliations I in my mask, powder woman, sick of everything, my own failings most of all. Someone I heard jumped into the pit the orchestra, during the third act and landed between harp and horn, mangled like a doll at the bottom of a well. I…

Torchlight splinters in a crystal chandelier. Rebels have taken the palace. Yet, your mind sleeps safely in its skull. But, Sigmund Freud sets a fly in it. “We are made such that we can derive intense enjoyment only from contrast and little from a state of things.” Though the poli-sci major says that’s just one…

Steam lifting from the highways, ascending to the heavens beneath the misery of commute, fires below the pavement. I have become a better driver by the standards of Houston. I will hurt somebody if they deserve to be hurt. No, OK, no, but I’m an expert in menace. All this blinding steel and glass, we’ve…

When I see the bright clouds, a sky empty of moon and stars, I wonder what I am, that anyone should note me. Here there are blueberries, what should I fear? Here there is bread in thick slices, of whom should I be afraid? Under the swelling clouds, we spread our blankets. Here in this…

What separates four pounds of ground chuck elk from four pounds of ground chuck beef is two spoonfuls of black pepper, parsley, and seasoned salt. Source: the group home cookbook. When the game warden dragged a bull off the autumn highway or hauled a warm-bellied cow some poacher left to rot, he phoned us. I…

If only our children were colts, and sensible enough to be good at one thing. Running. Jumping some. Looking adorable. They would deserve our devotion. Think crepe myrtle, nudged after a brief rain. Think zealots. Think ocean waves, if we’d enough sense to give them unique personalities. Everywhere you look, willfulness. Bountiful willfulness. And these…