Poetry

Once was a story of following following. Return is rarely the reverse I value or so I led you like a zero out the zoo, toured it twice at once from your regard, and came to understand. Roughing it, a captive is another whom a captive asks, which one of us stays wilder. We watch…

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…

The heart shifts shape of its own accord—from bird to ax, from pinwheel to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest, a brown bear groggy with winter, skips like a child at the fair, stopping in the shade of the fireworks booth, the fat lady’s tent, the corn-dog stand. Or the heart is an…

Washington, D.C. The cabdriver from Sierra Leone, who missed his home, but doubted he would ever go back, maneuvered the car on its bald tires in the snow and slush like a fish through the sparse traffic from Washington Circle to the Museum of Natural History. The people in charge of my country, he said,…

Theseus had one the first time he went hunting the minotaur, an embarrassing little tale the bards usually ignore, but it’s true as the golden beard on Hercules’s face. Theseus took his sword and ball of string, then wound his way through much of the labyrinth, his marching boots thudding hollowly on the earth, then…

                        and remote, and useful, if only to itself. Take the fly, angel of the ordinary house, laying its bright eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out delicately along a crust of buttered toast. Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest dump where other flies have gathered, singing over stained newsprint and reeking…

                     There it was, happening in spite of cold slant rain, crosscut of wind against our faces, and the          spent light of the shortest                      day of the year—a muddy cow on her huge side, all four feet stretched straight out in the air,          heaving                      to push what looked like a swollen…

for Dale Devereux Barker   The artist and author wish to express their gratitude to the publications in which these collaborations originally appeared: “Particeps Criminis”: TransAtlantic News; “Disgruntled Lug”: Science and Wonder; “Forbidden Rhymes”: Psychology Today; “A Sable Figure Cloaked in Gloom Told Us This Hilarious Joke”: Psychological Digest; “Killer Abstractions”: Modern Psychology; “You Don’t…