Poetry

Gaithersburg, Maryland At Scot Gas, Darnestown Road, the high school boys pumping gas would snicker at the rednecks. Every Saturday night there was Earl, puckering his liquor-smashed face to announce that he was driving across the bridge, a bridge spanning only the whiskey river that bubbled in his stomach. Earl’s car, one side crumpled like…

And then I said, That’s what it means to testify: to sit in the locked dark muttering when you should be dead to the world. The muse just shrugged and shaded his blue eyes. So naturally I followed him down to his father’s house by the river, a converted factory in the old industrial park:…

Pushing aside stiff panties with his stick the old man, stabbing cans, moves closer to the trembling wool coat, gnawed bare in spots, a patched dress, hitched up around her hips. He watches her hand in its private shiver and the furious rocking that lifts her into the secret palace of lost pleasures beyond the…

and green plaid shorts goes strolling through Juneau Park at eight o’clock with only a hooded yellow windbreaker for protection, trawling the bushes after work while tugboats crawl the dark freshwater outlook. Mist coming in not even from a sea, rain later in the evening from Lake Michigan, a promise like wait till your father…

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…