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His anguish was the squeeze of strangers ravaging his language, English, his anger, strangled, snapped him free at twenty-one to choose a certain simmering neighborhood in the city for revenge, carnage, and split the scene with a new name, gunman, lavished on him by newsmen as he crossed state lines, tuning in. A small boy’s…
Terrace Storms are inconsequential. A terrace always reverts, loyal subject, to the sun. Hallway A tunnel of betweenness. Here anything can bed anything. Back Fence I only wish it were higher. Don’t watch me. Front Porch Goddamn Astroturf, who’s it trying to fool? The one lone step, a mendicant slab— ungenerous to a fault, fatal…
I have been a day boarder, Lord. I have preferred the table to the Bed. I have proffered, Lord, and I have profited, Lord, but little, but not. I was Bored, Lord, I was heavy, Lord. Heavy bored. Hopeless, Lord, hideous, Lord. Sexless. I was in love, Lord, but not with You….
I don’t know what I was thinking taking us to the Museum of Surgery but we left very glad of anesthetic and the sky entirely uncut-open. Later, it was nearly impossible to see the haystacks because it turned out we were in the Museum of Museum Guards. One woman was eight feet tall, her head…
for Hilary In the lit room, an inkblot runs on a napkin like antlers into a three-quarter moon. Beginning to speak, I. . . gesture toward the ceiling, push my hair back behind my ear, wait— hearing a flower, red, blown by wind as on a prairie, in summer.
Because my daughter loves the dog, he is less dog than spirit guiding her dark center. The wolf of intent and action, he answers her low whistle. He is all hers, tail and eye, one ear cocked, as if he had been waiting all this time, emissary of her own imagination, born the same year…
On Grove Street we talked about writing in a room jammed with bodies, but now no smoke. Everything else was the same including my belief that it would never end. Ken said to Roberta that because they lived in rent- stabilized flats, they had the luxury of writing all hours of the day and night…
Who knows the secrets of someone else’s marriage, she said We had dinner with them twice a week for twenty-three years and now we’ve heard (nobody called, we just heard) that she’s living with her aroma therapist and he has a thing for teenage boys Specifically, it’s redheaded teenage boys having sex with fox…
I live by the river, daughter to no one. Of course, I want. The formless sea fills every window, always the sleeping gift in my left hand, not how the life was outlined. The underwater road is obscured, as it should be. Light years waste away in my body. When my mistress sends…
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