Poetry

What a reprieve from all this stultifying heat. And all the threats implicit in that heat: the sweep and snare of blackberry, razor barb of concertina wire. The bluish teasel nearly chafed you with its bracts. You’ve made it through some muck with your absolute body still intact. So far, the Camp Far West lake…

My brothers are notorious. They have not been to prison. They havebeen imprisoned. The prison is not a place you enter. It is no place.My brothers are notorious. They do regular things, like wait. On mybirthday they say my name. They will never forget my name. Whatis that knowledge? Is it sadness? The days of…

for the Wu Tang Clan and 1992 Shaolin’s flowers, imperial and ready for slaughter. Bobby Digital wears the wings of the only saint he knows. Come blessed angel with your skull-cup of blood. Enter this chamber with your black sword and a streetcar full of flagging desire. When the children ask for water, give them…

The Day of Pentecost came without the usual ladder of tongues. The     spike, driven through our white-bread boned shirts into our bare melon hearts, remained dry. The locusts, slung low in     the trees, remained in our breath. The prophet, robed in wind, remained lost in the wilderness. The     scarves about our heads. Something like a butterfly kissed the…

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…

What a name to call your sister—Nada:Nothing—word I’d learned in Spanish,where d sounds like th, Natha, two-thirds                of the way to Nathalie where, in French,               the th sounds like t, as in Nativity: Birth,               the opposite of Nothing, though all who are born return to it. Nada—the wordcontagious, even Mom fizzing laughteras she said, “Don’t call your…