Poetry

While Three stacks sand on the tide wall. The welcome wagon dropped them here, between tours of the mudflats, between old men lining up shots of birds on one leg. Two says, It’s always been almost exactly like this, hasn’t it?, and Three misses what a dozen of us couldn’t fail to catch. The path…

Even the night         suffers where it came from. And not         until the shadows of mimosas gather over the creek, like large         moth wings, un- spoken, will stars         recover. You see, we both want the same thing. Like a dibble         piercing the earth, turning over         the moist sod, it is…

I took a pin to my eyes and broke the surface tension and scooped out the machinery that so faithfully pictured what surrounds and refuses to wake us I sewed shut the lids singing I watched the sun rise with my brain and my skin and my useless pin and I fell from that terrible…

Though the memory doesn’t feel like mine, I must have been there, moving north northwest, holding, up above the Perfume River, with Simon, Isaac, our Arab gunner, Vince, called Pineapple because of his face, the NVA who kept on smiling, who would not stop to save his own life, and Peter who had stopped asking…

Down among the art shows     they made some striking models, grotesqueries! It made us think     life wasn’t quite like that was! It certainly gave us pause.     It certainly gave us pause for thought. The room that had no windows     was interesting. The pictures where every face was always     the artist’s…

The symposium entitled Why a Machine Can Write Better than You, and Does wasn’t nearly as popular as Flamethrowers: Is There One in Your Future?, and neither could hold a candle to Guppies in the Kitchen: A Normative Reading. The preponderance of jaded gardeners at Low-Maintenance Gravel: Future’s Flower was nearly equaled by the architects-on-the-lam…

The last withered one held so long by such a weak tree. Who needed who? I’ll never know. It’s over. The apple just dropped to the snow crust. Things have changed. It’s the only color in the field. The one-eyed gray squirrel finds it by positioning his head to see the side blind to him….

On that January day of gales and sleety squalls the women were being married high on the hill above the city, in the chapel of the University and afterwards they stood in the cloisters shivering in their wedding gowns, being photographed, singly or with a kilted husband by their side the men taking quick drags…

Six days a week at 4:40 a.m. sharp, the town crew, two men named Harold in a green town truck, rumbled down the old sewer plant road as if there was a national emergency, crying out, “Code Big Blue, Code Big Blue,” trying to reach the sewer plant before the giant blue prophylactic surfaced and…