Poetry

As a boy I killed to kill, clubbed frogs on the banks of a polluted river as their knobby eyes protruded through the foam of filth; turned sun on ants, magnified Sol to fire, stalked them with the glass as they scuttled to escape my God-sized wrath. And if allowed a gun, a .22 like…

The smart money spent the summer— and left the poorer relatives agape, and sent the change in ash and oak, postmarked, laughs galore in Smoky Mountains, & seashore where she sold her shells & other things. The genre’s born of envy: If I were dead I’d write you still, and come to you, tapping the…

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…

My mother waited till now to hand down this gold razor her father let slip in the washbowl. In a hurry to teamster the horses, soap in his earlobe and nostril, he climbed into the fire wagon. When she poured the wash water onto pebbles, hard gold sluiced at the bottom with the whiskers. A…

—suggested by John Searle’s thought experiment My one bulb may cast more shadows than light (the corners are always lost) but it proliferates in the red and black lips of my four thousand six hundred twenty-three lacquered trays, and I can see well enough to do my job. The room is compact. I can reach…

Though I’ve lived a life and I have lived amongst men and I have Loved this life as an experiment—an act of science And an act of ruth—I’ve kept for this city my last half heart (I lost the other to the chance of art.) And so, stirred of a         loud silence, Slow snow as…