Poetry

short for daughter—it was the best they could do. Dad raised horses near the Sweetwater, selling to miners. February 1st, three feet of snow and the cabin burned down, though the lucky barn was saved. The day I was born, Father bedded Mother in the stallion’s stall, moving Old Bud in with a mare. Mother…

Hasn’t everyone lived in an invisible And essentially unreal, imaginary city With beautiful empty buildings on byways Or sewers called canals filled with Slopping water and huge coffins offering Pronged upright musical clefs to the air As the whole load staggers nobly Toward the extraordinary, and maybe Venice Was named for Venus, the gondola For…

July 1878 Even sage hens were panting. Belle Bishop and I dangled our feet in a cooling bucket of well water while sewing clothes for our corn husk dolls. On the horizon, particles like a fine snow blew across washboard sand and platinum wheat grass. Sheep stampede, I said. And Belle said, Corn silk does…

It’s not a nice thing. Not a nice idea. Or it might be a nice idea. Who knows? King Kong. Mighty Joe Young. Cheetah. But it’s not nice, not really. Living with monkeys is not pretty. Beside the quart of chocolate milk (which had to be divided equally, my brothers and sister slowly measuring), live…

stood across the dusty street from Sam’s Shade Tree Saloon. Once, during a holdup, bullets whizzed through the door past the trimmer’s chair where Mama sat not five minutes before. That was the year of the flood, when we had to pile hat trimmings on high shelves and escape with our lives and Mama’s wool…

the Old Country where the children we were walk around in black and white movies, long nights with bugs flying in my window, dreams slippery as wet fish, moans in the air from our parents’ room? Horses kicked at their stalls, heat shivered in the summer skies. Sleepless we held our breath, saw shadows come…

After he left, even the topography shifted. Overnight our seaside resort became winter dusk in Detroit. Tall buildings stared me down, and like rush hour denizens pressed their gray bodies against mine. Their shadows quivered in my windows and coffee cups and tasted of secondhand smoke. Like me, they were all insomniacs. One corporate center…

There was this cock in high school, not that I had anything to do with it but we girls talked a lot, giggled, how it had a job to do and was often seen rising behind its spandex suit at the country club. It worked pretty good, we figured, but there was this one girl…

Sacred day of rain, the crowds on Karol’s Bridge thin out, slightly repentant of their tourist ways, hunker down in pensions and hotels, to ponder the weird twists of language to be found in their brochures, or complain of the thinness of the towels, or of the pickpockets who speak the quick language of the…