Poetry

        That rat’s too smart to come to the rows of crumbs I sowed by the pond, he has the patience of true hunger, he’ll wait me out         with the same tenacity I had as a child, hungry to grow strong enough to escape the nunnery without being caught.         I loved the rats…

Tacked on the wall, a map of my sad luck, places self-pity has planted its flag. In the bed, my body, a book in its hand. In my skull, a voice reciting the words on the page one moment—an exegesis of a bungled kiss—and then the next enumerating the canyons and cliffs, the familiar indigenous…

Outside of town, back on that one country lane, they work down into the ground, pieces of cracked road lie to the sides, small black boulders. Deep brown earth makes a rim around the great opening, a moist lip. Machinery sits on each side, patient yellow creatures. Lights are hung, making the men’s uniforms a…

Quadruple bypass: yes, he had it. What happens next is anybody’s guess. After the surgeon’s pre-op visit he pulled the tubes and needles out, got dressed and stalked outside to smoke a cigarette. The surgeon threatened not to operate. Old heart, old curmudgeon, old genius, terrified old man who more than anyone knows form is…

Please note well, all you writers, editors, directors out there: when a phone call is terminated by the other person you do not, NOT, hear the buzz of a dial tone. You hear a faint click and then silence, absolute silence, the Great Silence, more eloquent than any electronic buzz could ever be. In fact…

One morning beginning to notice which thoughts pull the spirit out of the body, which return it. How quietly the abandoned body keens, like a bonsai maple surrounded by her dropped leaves. Rain or objects call the forgotten back: the droplets’ placid girth and weight; the dresser’s lack of     ambition. How strange it is…

Because her hair looked cool Because some of the best alien minds are watching     developments closely Because she is the traditional Daisy poised fragile before the     masculine mills Of production, yet wearing out six black pantsuits To bring us to acculturation and consequence Because the Nasdaq is plunging and there is a mandate…

I remember standing in the kitchen, stirring bones for soup, and in that moment, I became another person. It was an early spring evening, the air California mild. Outside, the eucalyptus was bowing compulsively over the neighbor’s motor home parked in the driveway. The street was quiet for once, and all the windows were open….

And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? —Yeats Let’s not pretend we could be less complicated than millions before us. Let’s be just friends, be Platonic, only look at the bottoms of each other’s feet, or skin on inner forearms, where the sun has done almost no…