Gray cloud like a sweater pulled over the heart of the moon. High-napped purple sky. Why are so many friends Leaving or getting left behind? Mao’s anti-sparrow campaign: to kill and eat the birds That were eating the grain. Winter sun drifts away Leaving thin taffy light. Venus Mercury Jupiter— Three pearls in the morning…
It’s winter in the tiny motel. The man and woman lie down naked and freezing. A blizzard streaming on the television, gloss of ice on the windows, the bourbon a bottle of fire. After love she licks his cold sweat, trying to seal herself into him. Smoke from their cigarettes rising, disappearing as they sink…
How many nights have I lain here like this, feverish with plans, with fears, with the last sentence someone spoke, still trying to finish a conversation already over? How many nights were wasted in not sleeping, how many in sleep—I don’t know how many hungers there are, how much radiance or salt, how many times…
At seven a.m., nobody’s here but me and the pigeons and a few sparrows caucusing in his hair. Everyone knows how patient he was. I talk to him sometimes, but he never answers. “Good morning, Mr. Lincoln. I’m going to clean you up real good today.” His hands rest on the chair, yet I’ve seen…
I’m remembering the time you sat on a roof in Wisconsin to get away for a smoke, and a drunk senior stumbled to the edge of the roof to take a piss then folded his body down next to yours. Below, a faint sound of drums and bass throbbed through the house. “Pigs,” said the…
for Reynolds Price This morning in my bathroom mirror, I glimpsed the slope of my shoulders, my chest thinning to a hint of ribs, the hair of my pouching belly black and beaded with water, and pondering myself limp and priestly, laced with blue veins, I judged nothing threatening. Sometimes, I admit, I even…
Almost winter and the groundskeepers are firing blanks into the trees, scattering a nuisance of grackles from the branches— Enough, say the guns, enough of all your excrement and birdsong, and the very sight is futility: great fistfuls of black confetti, the way they soar out shrill with panic and return …
You have seen vines climbing themselves, as though the moon were riding inside. Hordes of ants scooting along one spot and then scooting back again, sporting banners many times their size of butterfly wings. Consider an unruly nation, a revolution gathering forces, like this body of yours, wholly politic. In its momentary congress, each…
Each flake is an old Cape Cod church with its steeple broken off. Still it is possible to locate a hymn within. I was handed a thin porcelain implement by a man prepared to die. He said, They are alike: the baton of the maestro, the whitestick of the sightless.
No products in the cart.