Poetry

He entered the sty, and she cringed. She’d always Remember him, a beast with black hair And blue eyes, a young German, and the sound Of screeching ducks and gunshots in the barnyard Where treacherous neighbors had gossiped Away the good frightened family who’d stashed her And hers like livestock with souls, butchered then Or…

Helen Stetter   Born into an age of horse-drawn wagons that knocked and rocked over rutted mud in the hot wake of straw, manure and flies, today she glides to her birthday party in a chair with sparkling carriage wheels, along a lane of smooth gray carpeting that doesn’t jar one petal of the corsage…

The New Choice Pregnancy Testing Kits are hung along the ramp-up to the register. The woman ahead of me would pass hers with flying colors. She’s huge and sighing, the kids in her cart keep eying my candy. I recognize the cashier—she’s the girl who used to work at the Video Cave that closed. We…

Go tell the President: the wagon trail was lost out there beyond the sinking sun. The sun dance ended in a leaden hail. The brooks have all forgotten how to run. I found a feather but I lost the bird. I sent out fifty scouts and they returned with word that there would never be…

Red houses, white houses, drawing our curtains against the spectacle of each other washing dishes and trimming the dog’s nails. Now and then we exchange news. Life’s gotten harder, easier, nobody this week has tied a noose in the master bedroom, or watched his bed flame on the lawn. Nobody in a black auto pulls…

Pressed between print, haunting gutters, we traded closeness for dialogue and plot, dropped concordantly to sleep not long before dawn, hardbacks propped on our chests like tents on a plain in Cooper. Wingless, piscatorial, we dined on starches and molds, slid into cracks, crevices, bathtubs on occasion. Troubled to escape their slick, enameled palisades, we…

Beside the cash register in my favorite used bookstore I see a glass bowl of what seem to be postage stamps until I look closer: temporary tattoos of red and green,  with ornate black lettering Bruised Apple Books. Take one, says Andrew, Take two, as if he directs a film about the struggle of an…

Pulling out government coupons for the first time In a Krogers twelve blocks from her walk up So the bagboys and cashiers and seniors Browsing tabloids would all be strangers, She’s slow motion through and past their stares. She feels every nuance of her body As a tense repressed trembling, a calculated Conscious stepping, just…

The riddle of the garden is the garden. The hollyhocks, chest-high, their irresponsible profligacy. The nethering stonecrop. The wax in which the body walks. The fragrance kneeling at the lily’s mouth. The story that is the lily, the fragrance; the peonies, their exfoliate hives. The weavers in their close huts of wattle hurl questions at…