Poetry

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…

Back then I still believed it was possible to prevent certain things, until that hot afternoon. It was the middle of grain harvest, August of ’54, when Fred climbed down from his stalled combine and took off for Montrose to buy a part. Later I realized the part was a ruse of fate, like something…

From a sparse handful of seed comes summer— Corn and convolvulus. Scatter of color on the mountainside, near snow. Gone, we want to say, of some longing in the slim afternoon— Though poppies collapse to soft flesh at a touch, heather tolls its little bells . . . • A bee, trapped between windowpanes. Its…

for Angie and Darrell Our family came west from the plains; theirs came north from the desert. We met as neighbors at the intersection of aircraft factories and the Pacific Ocean in Hawthorne, California. “Join us for Thanksgiving,” they said. My husband and I and our two kids crossed the street with a platter of…

Sakti: a feminine power in Hindu thought— creative, perhaps destructive In my small niece’s room, the walls throb pink: pink tights lie, thrown on a flowered spread. Rose frills, mauve, & pearl—                 Girl colors, blended of blood & milk. A sprawled doll, & through the window fat, voluptuous clouds above the sea. The forms…

“. . . I once took him to the train station in Minden, seventy miles away from our home, and the trains only go through Nebraska at night, the middle of the night, cause they plan it that way, cause I suppose Nebraska’s a dark passage no one wants to make awake and so I…