Along a familiar hiking trail I recognizeagave, sage, the summer-blooming yucca,and sticky monkey flower. *As if they might be learning a new dance,elders plant their feet on steady ground,gathering wind in their arms to move cloud hands. *Returning home tonight I avoid crushinga snail that casts a scant shadowon the wide sidewalk in clear light of a…
Clear, please, as a glass house.Ladled in plates, liquidform, silica, sand, dolomite, lime. Then be tempered, shaped, cranedtill you stand fastened to the forestfloor, reflecting. And if a sudden garden strutsup, risingin ribboned slope of pine and pin oak, laurel or fleabane, you can draw markersfor their names, it’s all yours, isn’t it, the bitsto…
In late summer I swim across the lake to the stand of reedswhich grows calmly in the foot-deep water on the other side. It is like going to a florist’s shopyou have to take your clothes off to get to, where nothing is for sale and nothing on displaybut some tall, vertical green spears, and…
The room cannot feel its arteries stuffed with animal fatfrom the insulation. Cannot hope to alter its mouth andeating is not a thing that it can do well. The room hasn’ttaken a bath since 1987, but there was a slight wash in1992 bestowing the room its perforated body. The roomcannot control the content of its…
The kind Italian driver of the bus to Romeinvited her to his house—she was obviouslyhungry—and gave her sandwichesand raped her. All those years ago—she smileswhile telling it—contemptuous,somehowof her younger self, who drags behind her like a can.Grammar is greatbut who will write the sentence that includesthe story of the damage to her soul and how…
We’re in the middle of it, in the middleof the backyard barbecuing steakand chicken. Telling stories with our wives and girlfriends away,red and blue psychedelics, Coors Lightand breasts falling into our mouths again like basalt cliffs into the sea.Jeremy says, I did CPR on a gorilla once.A girl gorilla, a big one. I kept thinking,…
They’d traveled one by oneon their knees beneath the earthto be gathered at the station to be given robes and haloes and official papers. And a bus ticket each to the roadside motelin Ohio that heldthe reservations in their names, where those who’d been slain before them were waiting. Can these be the right martyrs?…
When I hear the young refer to someone as adouche bag, I want to say, You may havenever seen a douche bag. They were redrubber bags, like hot water bottles, you’dfill it and hang it high enoughso that gravity…I can’t go on,I see my mother’s douche bag, my poordouche-bag mom’s pathetic douche bag with itsclamps,…
And every morning the sun comes up. And the pretty coffee in a cup. And a bird meowing outside in a tree. And, on the ceiling, the water stain of England made sadder by singing in a minor key. The size of a coffin, and full of bees.Shadow on a tractor, mowing the field.The cat,…
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