Poetry

He returns her valentines with the misspellings underlined. Her life story read like a subpoena. Her pen leaks in his pocket. He wears the shirt for years. His life reads like an instruction manual. He wears red socks to her mother’s funeral. Her life story reads like a purchase order. She memorizes the work of…

    It’s been suggested: well kept lawns and fences, white porch swings and toast by the fire.     It’s been requested: puppies, a window of blossoming pear trees and a place for robins to nest. But I know that somewhere, out there the town is lit. The players begin to make music in all the…

Gyn’s packaged in pastel. I’m in the pink suite of X-Ray wrapped in baby blue (opens-in-the-front) behind a pink- flowered curtain, waiting for the pink- and-white-clad tech. The dressing room’s a cell smaller than solitary, papered pink. In the waiting room a fretful pink- with-fever baby settles at the breast of her mama. I reminisce:…

It was one of those things you just have to believe to see. Let’s call him, Kenneth— yes, Kenneth Oboto— sitting statue still, no, say: still as machete death— in a silk, leopard-skin tutu blouse and skullcap, Parade Magazine in hand— on a green-slatted Iowa City park bench, day-one, freshman orientation— like a beautiful, black-eyed…

Thief of the corn, patch of night against a perfect sky, I see you there watching me with your strange eyes.     What message do you bring me? When the leaves fall you’ll be all we have left. Perched above the cemetery walk, you add your two cents’ worth     when he reads the part…

Of A. Of the abracadabra triangled below the navel’s amulet. Of the underworld still with me as I drive all night to you following a red Trans Am, my beacon and talisman. Before me the mysterious lands of corn and soy. Behind me our Atlantic’s salty winds. O glorious Susquehanna and wild grasses! Here in…

At my father’s request I went into the city to ask for the Senator’s daughter’s hand. But she said she would not have me, nor any man. It was, I thought, a great pity: she was not only wealthy, but very pretty. So I told her that I would stand on the spot of earth…

I. Ancient Playground I’m standing idly by while Denis or “Dino” McCarthy (him of the wire-rimmed specs and the hair like a set of loosening springs) unzips his army pants, extracts his penis, and pisses stoutly into Chuck Gilheany’s brown quart bottle     of flattening Bud. He sleeps for now but soon will wake and…

1. Where water meets water, where rain hangs lead-heavy for days before finally deciding to harden and fall, where the nearest road is sixty miles away and that a narrow track of gravel, where the lake is as still as a photograph and has never been photographed, where the trout return in accordance with a…