Poetry

The featured pop star’s voice was too big for the waterfront  pavilion. That’s what the reviewer said. Her recent poignant hit  flew overhead, drifted right out the open sides  of the white tent, somehow tugging us with it, flinging us toward stars where we hung briefly before landing among jellyfish and buoys.  Once we were…

After seven nights of silence, he woke to seven drawings of a ram, pinned along his walls. Spit six seeds in a tin cup and trailed his hands along the white hall singing about something to do with morning. My father sat his easel in the musical and was a farmer, but wanted to be…

What have you done? Opened this box of sound, warped like sand beneath water, remember that? The waves of perception moving you away from me. We grow farther apart, but we are equal in our ignorance of how. No change there. Like celestial bodies distancing—like the animals in autumn. How? This knowledge, how will you…

After the protest at dusk, two policemen on horseback closing the park approached me and Vita and offered us rides home. Sheepish but game, we grabbed hold of their leather and galloped across field and hill to the edge. Gassed and smiling, we waved goodbye. Jim was waiting at the restaurant. I wanted to tell…

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!”