Poetry

The June humid stars puff above the living giving our street the delicate shade of a sad mirror given to dark compulsion. How strange everything is when everything is so simple. The people of our street pace the spotlit sidewalks, they so not speak, they wait like patients wait for loved ones gone, gone. We…

with their children running ahead, the shore is as messy as any other grassy edge where birds nest, rock spotted, blotched by gulls, geese, and gadwalls. Into the flocks, unexpected outburst of a hundred startled teal, wingtips all together, thrumming the air this close! Almost to touch. Wet sand slopped by my daughter’s small hands…

Just before she flew off like a swan to her wealthy parents’ summer home, Bruce’s college girlfriend asked him to improve his expertise at oral sex, and offered him some technical advice: use nothing but his tongue tip to flick the light switch in his room on and off a hundred times a day until…

I’m hanging out and on, on a froggy Saturday with my friends Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and So On, stimulisting in the O room, motivated by the jukebox of haunted songs. Here, when it gets dark, it gets very late and as cold as the sibyled voice invented by insomnia, in the pseudonymous syntax used by…

    A sow rooting around in a garden uncovered a silk purse.     “Oh Good Heavens!” she squealed in horror. “That’s Gertrude’s ear!”     Another sow trotted over, and stared at the soiled object.     “No, no,” she concluded, with a relieved snuffle. “That can’t be Gertie’s ear. Gertie’s ear didn’t have a clasp.”  …

Not sure what to leave in, I begin with Jenny, her sister and me at the anchor of our great mall, Sears: We stuff cassettes down her crooked spine’s brace, and stroll through our mother’s aisle (lifting douches), into the store ladies’ room where we fill the drooping bags at taps that keep running. Past…

Would you know a saint if you saw one? Say you’re on the delivery table, legs drawn up For each agonizing push, while everyone else is poised To welcome forth your frightened protégée— When, instead, a smiling light slowly issues out From your dark interior, assembling itself Like a mirage hovering above the linoleum floor—…

Mummified by gauzy July heat, my escape into the library’s neutral cool brings me to the dog-eared, thumbed-through news: “His failure was his greatest success,” says “Milestones” in Time magazine: “Died—Frederick Exley.” And then this prick of a hurt born of the aforementioned fact, and I feel it: Brain- muddled, maybe, but still functional—pulse flushes…

It’s as though you’re snowed in at the airport forever.     Or you’re sent to purgatory, say: you spend all this time learning the story of your own life     and then you don’t get to tell it. This one begins with me and the other guys     carrying stuff into our half of the…