black-eyed susans sound abused, as if the night beats flowers up and needs help loving as people love who sign letters xoxoxoxo, which reminds me of football coaches showing massive men how to destroy massiver men on a chalkboard at halftime. if you are a flute thrown out a window on the way to montgomery,…
He goes out the door as someone I don’t know. Not the boy-man I was at 17 but somewhat lagging behind, somewhat further ahead, dressed carefully for others in red and black, his body a deliberate mystery. No idea what he knows, what he says, what he does. I’m not supposed to know, only the…
Mistgreen maple leaves just twenty feet from my looking, my remembering an equally soft morning in Monterosso, woman with left hand in sea, right hand cupping a baby’s head to breast, how feminine it seems, the support, this mist rounding sharpness from bird chatter, this wombing of fence, of farm, of distance inviting me to…
He couldn’t wait to finish a film before he started the next, forty-three total plus the nine-hundred-thirty-minute tv series; refused to commit to any one lover, man or woman; fucked his actors in Munich hotels and Morocco châteaus; left a trail of broken hearts, one ex-wife, four wrecked Lamborghinis, two suicides; popped pills to stay…
There’s something casual about maple leaves. They’re almost mittens, in the first place. They refuse to stand for the national anthem. And when it rains, as it rained last night, a rain I listened to on the floor, a rain as delicate as a shoplifter, they’re moved by each raindrop and resist each raindrop, creating…
Psychic rib soaped clean, skeleton key to every lock in this house. Heartless, this place, as I’ve come to christen it. The wish then abandoned in the soap dish, near the wet bone china. Last Christmas saw us shivering at Lake Erie, stroking the battered nose of a dinghy. Abandoned. Bone- clean, its hull scoured…
One moment you were tossing me a football in the empty field behind your house and the next I was getting clobbered by a linebacker and run over by a safety. Forty years vanished in that instant when the pigskin touched my hands, which are still soft, and the defensive end straightened me out with…
They’d take her child away, unless he shed more weight. But every time he cried, she fed. More weight. My little niece too light, and snow not dense enough, I squeezed myself behind her on the sled: more weight. So thin her body cannot warm itself, she picks at the meager salad on her plate….
Samurai sword-fighting lesson, Tokyo We’re using the iaito or “practice sword” now as opposed to the shinken or “live sword” which looks as though it can cut through lampposts and is “hungry for the flesh of its owner,” says smiling Sakaguchi-san through a translator, which is why I’m getting lots of unintentional laughs when I…
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