Poetry

A good hard slap to the middle of my head. Three blackbirds sing in a red cage, three last filaments of thought that will probably snap. Their chatter rouses the gold-painted saint cross-legged near my bed. Something larger’s visible edge. I hesitate to reach out; then it comes to me that it is mine as…

I erased it from the blackboard. Chalk bits dust to floor. The alphabet trailed me out of school. I wrote it again, in bold. By afternoon, I’d ripped out the page and fed it to the ducks. Bits of paper from bills into the pool. I walked to where the dam collects the shore and…

How do you know? —Hardy, The Year’s Awakening Finch at my feeder, how do you know in muddy March to turn the first gold feather? By the light’s small increase, by the lesser night, the cell’s disturbance cold winter sleep awake? You do not know, nor I, why jonquils burn nor blood in Palestine—unwitting feather,…

A giant poplar shades the summer square. Breakfast shift done, Reem smooths her kinky mass of auburn curls, walks outside, her leaf-print dress green shadow on post-millennial bright air. It’s almost noon. I smell of sweat. I smell despite bain-moussant and deodorant, crumpled and aging , while recognizant of luck , to be, today, perennial…

There is, indeed, no reason why Failure should not have its Plutarch…                                                                                      —Samuel Smiles What made you pull it from the shelf? The lettering on its spine rubbed off hundreds of hands ago. It could be anybody’s book now, as a skull could form the armature for Hitler’s cheek or Jesus’. Open it. No…

We’ve prepared him so well for re-entry: His arms are stronger from pulling himself up on that triangle of stainless steel dangling above his bed at Walter Reed. His deltoids look defined, he works them when his wheel spokes flash dodging the physical therapist, the mouseshit, the black mold behind the door—      …

It seems insane now, but she’d be standing soaked in school day morning light, her loose-leaf notebook, flickering at the bus stop, and we almost trembled at the thought of her mouth filled for a moment with both of our short names. I don’t know what we saw when we saw her face, but at…

“Do all dudes have one big testicle and one little tiny one?” Hieronymus asked hiking up his poodle skirt as we staggered Down Main Street in our getup of wigs and pink bonnets The night we sprayed NEGROPHOBIA all over the statue of     Robert E. Lee guarding the county courthouse, a symbol of the bondage…

Just as I’m going into the native seed store, where the ancient seeds of the world’s various peoples are kept and sold so that they can perhaps root in tomorrow’s ground, a young man who was just on the other side of the street, yelling furiously at his stoned friend on the other, quiets the…