Poetry

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 bags with their…

“No Loitering” reads the sign by the school.But what about a school that offers coursesIn loitering as an art, each class designedTo break another link in the argumentThat we ought to be somewhere else by nightfall,Ought to start now if we’re to arrive on timeFor the meeting of those in need of a truthWe’ve distilled…

You are a wretch and a leech and a dirtyold man and have been trying to pushinside me for years. Well, come on then.There’s something about the plum warm air. Usually at this time of day I don’twant to see people. Usually when I’m onthe old swings I think about the manwho stopped his car…

It was a straw light, a blond light, a water light in the window when I looked outside and saw it was still daylight, flooding the hot, white room of her death that had been the hot, white room of her maternal loneliness. The heel of my hand hard on her sternum as her heart,…

for my mother, Veronica Cazier (1955-1991) The undertaker gripped my hand. I said I wanted Dairy Queen. I touched her cheek because I needed proof—and after, Dairy Queen. It’s what I asked for every day: to go to Dairy Queen. Worse than dead, she wasn’t quite herself. I pictured Dairy Queen. I’d finished second grade…

that spins too fast and then we get erased. The red and yellow leaves tickle at first, then burn all the way down our throats when they fall. Who will grease our arms for the ones we love? We release them to white bedsheets first, then to a blanket made of earth. They slip through…

Read it on the Greyhound back before I saw Bogart in Marlowe’sclothes,                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 didn’t tell…

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…

(Where the woman in the iron lung breathes out every person she’s evermet, a big breath, like it’s cold and she’s pretending to smoke.) I said     I’m dead you put blanketson my iron lung    said Must be cold    you’realways cold    Dead I said again   you saidThat won’t stop youfrom stealing…