Poetry

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…

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,…

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…

                        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…

A year later, a Tuesday or Wednesday,           I remember the students out back playing tennis           in air so cold it puckered the rain barrel & my radio said what it           couldn’t say while Big Joe did bench presses in the basement           & the radio went idiotically silent. Remember Al Hibler singing…

You are the hero of this poem, the one who leans into the night and shoulders the stars, smoking a cigarette you’ve sworn is your last before reeling the children into bed. Or you’re the last worker on the line, lifting labeled crates onto the dock, brown arms bare to the elbow, your shirt smelling…

You will use it for the flowers the others bring because he is dead. Or you will use it for dark blue light, the arc of it when, the next evening, the sun cries over the house and sends all the windows to the floor. A trill of orchids wilts over the rim. You will…