on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad—wheels of the train clacking and clicking I wish it could be rhythm on a drum or church piano something for the folks to remember of working men & Mr. McCorkle Redcap porter dishwasher peach brown lemon yaller black tall and fat working men with those smoking & sweet smelling…
“Obscenity” is often not an expression by an individual uttered under great stress and condemned as bad taste, but one permitted and even prescribed by society. —E. E. Evans-Pritchard, British social anthropologist, 1925 Among the Ba-Ila (“among” as if swarming the petri dish of the British Imperialist), there exist expressions used collectively, that is, in…
Like that answer written on a trip that after makes no sense, we remember before birth, but cannot force it to the clumsy breath of this wet hurt of a joy we are now. So let that big boy go and find your tribe to ride with. We spilled the apple juice long ago. I…
How, in summer, a man and woman, as in Paris, embrace under trees, and the leaves and the grass bend back and sweat amends them, in a park where the squirrels eat well, where the bronze horse could heave off its officer. How it is like water, sex in summer. You cover yourself, your leaves…
Peeking for hours into the fire, I find the faces staring back— marching cities rise and fall. Still as stone I sit, practicing death. My machine of flesh hangs lightly. Our body’s noise keeps us sleeping. Later we arise into dreams, and awake to Jacob’s ladder. At death we graduate. There the slow-mo stomp of…
When I think of you, you disappear in stages, As if I were paralyzed below my heart And wore, like a blanket, a thousand pages Of you on my lap, who come apart In the slightest wind, and disperse Like leaves. I trade you for the universe, Which holds me back When I lean over…
Coach looks at the scoreboard, tries again to press another loss in the backcourt of his brain. The players feel their blood quiet, return to its common wander. The fans shake their heads like tired dogs, put on their coats, hats, gloves, leave the bleachers, head back to what’s always there. The cops shrug, step…
It was older than the red barns, older than the frog pond for the cattle, than the road up Clark Hill, and the live oak colonnade leading to the rich man's brasses. Older too than ox blood and the idea of honor, or the dream of dominance. It was a stillness of light pouring in,…
On the Schuylkill Expressway, in the midst of a snarl of traffic, a truck from N.Y.C. pulled up alongside, with red filigree appearing through a film of grit in swirls like an ice cream sundae: “Coconut Don Fu Delight,” the fading billboard explained, evoking “tasteless bean curd with a white chewy sweetness of caramelized coconut,”…
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