Poetry

Before work I would stop by Constantine’s place for a glass of red wine and a cup of coffee. He kept the wine under the counter and poured it in secret into a large tumbler. “If anyone asks,” he once said, “tell them it’s the milk of a red cow.” You could tell which men…

When Gus sees his father, they don’t speak of it. His mother is dead. What was it that he did when he was ten? He remembers his father stripping him and hosing him down outside, and beating him with a peeled switch. Sent to his room without dinner, he grew up dreading the evening meal….

The wine is perfect, an arterial red, a red so serious in candlelight it’s black. He lifts the chipped glass and toasts his brother with a slight nod, a little backward gesture of the head only the two of them understand. The late night crowds around the closed windows giving back the two old men,…

What she is waiting for never arrives or arrives so slowly she can’t see it:       like the river       bluing silver and wearing minutely deeper into its channel, the flow hardens to carved stone as she fidgets       beneath the whirling fan       impatient for the train that rocks us above the water to…

I go back to the scene where the two men embrace & grapple a handgun at stomach level between them. They jerk around the apartment like that holding on to each other, their cheeks almost touching. One is shirtless, the other wears a suit, the one in the suit came in through a window to…

1 The Roxie is down the street from the locked ward where I left my husband. I took the children to the movies that night, a comedy about the war: in the candy dark, the laughs went off like explosions. Here’s the letter he left me, a green crayon scrawl. These are the sayings I…

I wanted the Persian Isfahan rug with the all-over garden of paradise design, the one with one thousand two hundred knots per inch. Its sinister history was of no importance to me, irrelevant the conditions of the weavers, whether they were hungry or suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome. I loved the way the tree of…

When he sang of what had passed, the trees would lean toward him, he could suspend the suffering of the damned, he could bring back the dead.   Don’t look back! . . . Hell is a spotless room overlooking the ocean; she wants out. “I’m heading for nowhere, what do I have to look…

When I turned twelve and feared I’d go to hell, I used to write lists of my mortal sins on paper scraps I tucked into my wallet. Each time I broke one of the big commandments— not little ones, such as to honor parents which even Jesus, like me the son of peasants, had never…