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…
Limited, the body’s vocabulary cannot always say what it feels, what it wants, what it is. Unendurable, this voicescrape, a song bird lashed to my throat— Where can I escape from thy spirit? Where can I flee from…
What light in the sky to leave, what flags through town, their white Q’s. How I was as I had been has nothing against captains, with distance between an awkward door & fence, in what appear to be the stars in a month in this string of deadly months. My movement upends,…
Boats in the front yard! Blue tarps enduring the stare of the winter sun hollow as clouds that have been emptied everywhere. Air flowing in defiance of Heraclitus, that you can breathe twice, and lose shingles from any direction. Bottles in the window sparkle with the names of defunct institutions and entrepreneurs. Purple and green…
not a woman’s eye not a man’s eye not the metal that hit what the eye caught Pain thinks of something without description & blank & luminous nothing of blue or gray or blue gray & the land & the sea without description not a shoe not a shirt not a string wound inside a…
There appears suddenly, out of nowhere, a blemish in the mirror on a piece of sentimental furniture, a bubble in the bevel of the scalloped border. Where are you now, my father, fifty-four years gone, whose adolescent face once looked back at itself from this mirror? (Father it wasn’t given me to know. Father…
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