Poetry

My mother was once held at knifepoint for a day. The man positioned the blade at the blue places of her pulse, as if tracing the ground for water, divining as it’s known. Or maybe I’m thinking of the pointed device that searches for sapphire, bright veins beneath the earth. Throughout my childhood, I imagined…

PUNISH THE SHOOTER, NOT THE GUN is a hard line to take seriously, as seen on the bumper of an old Dodge hearse spray-painted black and gold, passing on the right. If I honk, will he think friend or foe? A question best left rhetorical, so I keep my hands at ten and two and…

Suddenly everyone’s friendly, 2020. We’re working in the front yard, Boyd and I, and our neighbor who’s never spoken to us calls out, “Good job!” And now we’re talking. She’s seventy-seven. “Early spring,” she says, and then, “My grandkids can’t come up to visit, because.” We nod. We’re nodders. We wave. We’re wavers. For years,…

I carry the East with me, I carry it to the West. Wrap it in layers in a small suitcase tagged for the West, In America there is a romance that calls for leaving Known people & places to head for the West. I open a suitcase & stare at shoes that leaked sand; Oh,…

Billie, I told the Devil not to let you into Hell. It’s where you think you’re going soon, when at last that golden horse’s hooves run roughshod over your heart. No, you have your own heat, a heady steam off your scalp. Before you, I hated my smell, like his fingertips after stealing a girl…

Who was that girl in the maze, too busy being a needle to understand she was also an eye? All bothered heat. All light the underside of a storm cloud scraping the city with its silver. Some of her is left in me, slipped into the marrow, caged beneath ribs. Is she this blunt thumping?…

“It’s not a good disease to have,” my doctor says. I admire his grim honesty, I admire it greatly. “Indolent, but it usually does progress.” Which sounds about right for me. Two years of misdiagnosed torment and now this. I ask him about suicide. He nods. “It happens,” he says. When I tell him I’ve…

Lunch recess, a football tossed in the air, John paced the length of the fence as a small group of girls gathered to gossip about Duane and who he liked while John, wanting so much to connect, ran at them screaming “John germs,” touching Cindy’s back. When the football soared too high, John jumped up on a stone…

For Laurie Lago It’s an opulence often best manifested in the obituaries. Edward, for instance, for whom the most that could be said was a headline that he had been “A Lifetime Member of Costco.” Or that real daredevil Leo, whose very last words were “Watch this!”