At the stained window, a morning jay. I stop my scissoring, as if I could reclaim a Santiago of bird-call and sudden ease, as if I could annul the battle-gray maze of gutting jails, courthouses, morgues— purgatory where I bend over the burlap, again and again, to show the world the smashed black bell of…
They’re going to Glasgow, they’re going to Inverness and to Skye. They’ll ride over bogs of musk ox and arctic foxes, tracing the scat of polar bears, open-mouthed masses swallowing snatches of blue vacancies, ragged absences filling the empty air, sea birds climbing, vanishing only to emerge in Reykjavík and west, soaring…
He took him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And He added, “So shall your offspring be.” I have lived in tents and know how faint a trace we leave behind us on the earth; how, when the body fails, the soul folds its…
In the days when a man would hold a swarm of words inside his belly, nestled against his spleen, singing. In the days of nightriders when life tongued a reed till blues & sorrow songs called out of the deep night: Another man done gone. Another man done gone. In the days when one…
If I arrived early, I had to listen To hundreds of sewing machines Spiraling their high-pitched arias Up against the mill’s metal shell. Each woman, a soloist withdrawn Into her small cubicle of work, Sang the crazy hope of piecework— Another zipper, another dollar. A wall chart traced their numbers In money’s green line. It…
Has a glow to it, distant and round at the end of the mine shaft, a yellow malignant light. Once seen, it loses power, becomes tarnished and dull as river stones, lifted from their affair with water. Money that has lain too long in the vault no longer has value. The currencies we so believed…
from The Diary of Francis Kilvert One bell wouldn’t ring loud enough. So they beat the bell to hell, Max, with an axe, show it who’s boss, boss. Me, I dreamt I dwelt in someplace one could relax but I was wrong, wrong, wrong. You got a song, man, sing it. You got a…
Here where I have driven past a thousand times, here off the two-lane blacktop, the tattered blanket of April tries to warm the icy lies and whys of what lies a few feet beneath the surface of what we know. A loud, yellow backhoe and several diggers delve into the hardened breasts of our mother…
There’s spit on my face and a smirking sixteen-year-old with a cross tattooed on each eyelid waiting to see what comes next. Reggie’s got three inches, fifty pounds on me, but as I wait for backup that doesn’t come, I know that, like me, he’s a sorry mix of testosterone and fear. Alarms and red…
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