Poetry

I carry the East with me, I carry it to the West.Wrap it in layers in a small suitcase tagged for the West, In America there is a romance that calls for leavingKnown people & places to head for the West. I open a suitcase & stare at shoes that leaked sand;Oh, I mourn not…

He asks what I want him to do to me, the next movecapable of unraveling our bodies precariously stacked.I tell him the truth: I don’t know. I do not tell himhow I still can’t feel my body when in another man’s arms.I travel—backward, forward—the horizon is concealedby the still-brown trees crowning the interstate,first through a…

Letter openers, proving we miss people urgently. Bottlecaps popping with satisfactory sound. All the miraculous ways to experience time— a roller coaster, a deep breath in sideways snow, flicker of windowsill basil glimpsed from an El stop at dusk. City streets patterned like plaid in a dishrag filling with sun. Portable stoves. Recycled stationary. The…

The featured pop star’s voice was too big for the waterfront pavilion. That’s what the reviewer said. Her recent poignant hit flew overhead, drifted right out the open sides  of the white tent, somehow tugging us with it, flinging us toward starswhere we hung briefly before landing among jellyfish and buoys. Once we were part of the water,…

Billie, I told the Devil not to let you into Hell.It’s where you think you’re going soon, when at last that golden horse’s hooves runroughshod over your heart. No, you have your own heat, a heady steam off your scalp. Before you,I hated my smell, like his fingertips after stealing a girl from her mother’s…

Who was that girl in the maze, too busy being a needleto understand she was also an eye? All bothered heat. All lightthe underside of a storm cloud scraping the city with its silver. Some of her is left in me, slipped into the marrow, cagedbeneath ribs. Is she this blunt thumping? And if sowhere…

“It’s not a good disease to have,” my doctor says.I admire his grim honesty, I admire itgreatly. “Indolent, but it usually does progress.”Which sounds about right for me.Two years of misdiagnosed tormentand now this. I ask him about suicide.He nods. “It happens,” he says.When I tell him I’ve seriously considered it,he says my disease would…

Lunch recess, a football tossed in the air,John paced the length of the fence as a small group of girls gathered to gossipabout Duane and who he liked while John, wanting so much to connect, ran at themscreaming “John germs,” touching Cindy’s back. When the football soared too high, John jumpedup on a stone wall, losing his footing, impaling…

For Laurie Lago It’s an opulence oftenbest manifested in the obituaries.Edward, for instance, for whomthe most that could be saidwas a headline that he had been“A Lifetime Member ofCostco.” Or that real daredevilLeo, whose very last wordswere “Watch this!”