Poetry

Your head is the heaviest cabbage in the world, full of spiced apples and lamb. Where you are is where you must be—a gravel parking lot by a squat cinder-block building, slumped, a dropped marionette. You breathe, a ray aside a bucket of chum— after giving up the hook. The bow toward the big city….

Early January—gray millennial sky, clumps of snow the color of oysters here, there, under the besieged hemlocks. I follow my little dog along our gravel road to the brook crossing—there’s sludge and chain oil and silt in the roily water where the dog sniffs around, tail low, lifting his leg, claiming acreage; but it all…

I went to the river, but the river was dry. I fell to my knees, and looked to the sky. —Emmylou Harris Colleen, this is the time of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my virulent love for you. The Cowturdville Star-Times, which usually has a typo in every column, says…

The moment before I was born Mom sent Dad to Kepley’s Drive-in for a country ham sandwich. My unspoken name was country ham sandwich. My spoken name was tank because I rolled over and crushed the world, and was made of green metal. I was later called “surprise,” a polite name for stolen. Go to…

I. The land beside me filled with snakes. I would lose my land. They would come on camels, they would come on elephants. They would take Woman from the dark stone room. Knock over the clay. Knock the wind against the wall. Let it scatter. II. The order of the pebbles this way goes. Which…

Death does not speak to me with meaty breath although ancient hamburgers dance through my veins and the leering buffalo skull on the wall above my couch dribbles drool onto my heart. At fifty, I have learned to see the Grim Reaper in all his disguises. I can see him in a can of Budweiser….

In another hemisphere, it might be Spring. On another planet, there might be fifteen suns and no moon. You run the risk of no Miles Davis, no oxygen to breathe, no hyperbole. In the far-off corners of the cosmos, there might be ten key touch. There might be a constellation that resembles the profile of…

They’ll come she says just smear some jelly from your sandwich on the back of your hand and wait how she passes the drowsy hour of math before lunch the initials carved like Braille on the desk a fly alights on her sleeve her wrist they are drawn to us drawn to what is sweet…

this is god’s other flood my whole grave rising into the dirty-oven colored sky on that couple of wings you gave me