Poetry

The angle of the postman’s cap looked like he’d dressed himself in dark, the darkness, say, that’s lurching from his mouth, where teeth should be, a smile like charcoal, awkward on this full- grown man, but safer for his world where fuchsia picket fences float above a lumpy car that trails a cautious, chastened string…

The dogs have stopped barking. Even the grass has grown quieter, holding back from the wind. As you and I walk down the sidewalk, our voices are like a memory, whose deep purpose has gone inside, into the walls and floors and ceilings, where it no longer reaches the air but lies in wait for…

Wrung-out, aching, caked with a sweat he wouldn’t claim, living the wrong life, he shook the branch until the last apple fell, never glancing at the others, whose backs, as they gathered, were as arched and gravity-clutched as his, their gestures in the limbs as solemn, as exhausted of flight. Bees drifted where he labored:…

Quentin Carter’s, little Junie June-Bug’s running joke          was “Where’s my quarter,                   you better give me my quarter.” Junie, 12, runt of the 6th grade, School 109, Queen’s Village—          in your face, pest & joker,                   “Where’s my quarter, you better give me my quarter.” . . . This morning,          police arrested…

I never thought we’d meet. Now here he is, swinging his arms like a speed-walker. I thought he’d look ancient—almost half a century—but in my telescope, he looks a lot like me: a few less hairs, a limp I don’t like the look of, but not an old man, certainly, though reading glasses dangle from…

The tree bore the efflorescence of October apples like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. The wind blew in cold sweet gusts, and the burning taste of fresh snow came with the gradual dark down through the goldenrod. The blue and scarlet sky was gently losing its color, as if from…

for Angie Suss-Paul Around the corner where I lived a beautiful synagogue was burning. Around the corner where I lived. Around the corner. A beautiful synagogue. Was burning. Where I lived. Around the corner where I lived a beautiful synagogue was burning. My father came home in the evening I didn’t recognize him. He didn’t…

I talk the least of what I covet most, seldom look at what I wish to see, turn my nose away from what smells best, refuse to listen to my favorite opera, La Traviata, even when it’s sung in town for free. The Van Gogh show can’t make me walk the block to view it,…

off-season home of a circus elephant   Here, the past forgets its boundaries, shines through abandoned objects: the caved tin roof of the slave quarters, wind-beaten planks and rusted knives scattered in dust and sand. Soon, the elephant will make her slow way down this path, graze among the ruins and pines; each step an…