Poetry

When the iceberg pulled by a team of white horses comes sliding down the boulevard, the crowd, which had been so festive, whistling, hooting, throwing their hats in the air, grows silent. Almost silent are the ten Kikuyu warriors striding in slow     motion, one clenched fist shooting up in the air every ten paces…

We squat in the sun, in black dirt abraded from the mountain. You prick my arm with a thorn. “Does it hurt?” It does hurt. We’re playing nurse and mother getting her abortion. You draw out all my blood, then with invisible gauze from your imaginary white enamel tray bandage my sore arm. In her…

I am ashamed as I try to sleep, counting the wounded and the dead in this old day’s news, the grieving ones they leave behind. Counting stones and bullets, averted needs, the pretty breaths of my family beside me, counting on a world that I don’t trust to keep my children safe. What was I…

My aunt was upset by lesbians: Her sister, her sister’s lover, in particular. She imagined them, I think, giving each other Head over and over, though from what I knew —And I knew plenty—that couple made love With roughly the same frequency As did Auntie and Uncle Snort. They All had plenty to worry about,…

for R. Voisine His father, two brothers, and me, we turned off our saws for a rest of water and cake. Thirsty, he stopped, walked over and the loader’s back gate yawned and slipped its catch, threw him down onto a fresh stump, still that pink-white wet. I scooped him up. Blood fell on the…

Still I am not sure which is most vivid— the love now risen from its previous absence, or the future loss it rides like a shadow, the eye’s after-image of a bright light gone. In any case, with its harrowing blades, this fertile line of love already draws through me a beautiful symmetry: The invisible,…

For one thing I’m glad the goal of enlightenment means being so utterly stupid as to actually slip out the door every morning & live. With no second-guessings, no poses, just this leaning & slouching the experts term hope. Because people like me aren’t guilty of laughing at the passing streets. I mean I believe…

Already pregnant, she writes her name and his, Lou and Mike, over the cloudy pictures in True Stories. Black-and-white pictures of a leggy woman (Lou) draped, the arching stem of her throat almost tears from her head, so thrown back with pounds of hair and a dark man’s (Mike’s) kisses. Done eating,  Mike scrubs the…

The elevator is full of the swim team. The swim team knows How many goldfish Will fit in a phone booth. The window and its attendant shadows Are not wise. They are an insult To the swim team, Which has God on its side. The swim team knows How to pull a knife on the…