Poetry

I should have taken her, she was the only thing I saw in Panama I wanted. —Mary Jane Megquier The girl had the aspect of the plantains she squatted over: chartreuse-bright and curious what would follow. “Compralos,” she said, rattling coins in her palm. There were no shadows but her obsidian hair. “Sell her to…

I stood as long as I could on the edge of the pole house, one finger on reality, storms I could count, and a cup of milk in my other hand like a virtue I did not possess but nevertheless, took to my grip. As to the piñon and scrub oak at my feet I…

By then, by the time my brother Was getting married, weeks away from When the old apartment would be pulled down, The evenings were warm and the sounds of Freight trains were absorbed by three oleanders, Whipped by iron sounds and the wind of its passing. By then, by the time I was nineteen And…

Dear Larry: Looks like I won't need to borrow the car after all: the trip to L.A. is out of the question. I didn't know a life could break down like a chemical. Salt. Plutonium. The odorless noose of carbon monoxide. Up north a few years back, a group of kids committed mass suicide in…

I keep my eye on the desert room floating with silver and black blades, the shadows of date palms in the hands of the vanished magician. He is silent, missing repeatedly the lady in the white box. She's made an austere retreat into yet another nothing, into my own approval of not-doing in this heat!…

At twenty, John Berryman raised a fountain pen and wrote, Lear walked his patience by the sea And learned nothing. At the same age, Under the Fresno sun, I was saying to myself, I could get fifty bucks for my Rambler. The car had killed three stripeless cats And splattered a continent of butterflies. I…

Someone asked me once if the world changed whenever I crossed from one language to the other. She said she noticed how my voice changed. I listened to myself: it was the same voice, the same man speaking a strange language. I wondered about my face—if a certain look might be possible only in one…

I knock over the bottle of wine. It pours over my feet, cold, leaving a purple stain. This is private land. He is holding a gun. He tries to see between my thighs. The wine is sticky. I don't move. What are you doing? Screwing out here? Like we're the crazy ones. I want to…

It's staying light later, and through the pyracantha, Through memory and its prickly blood, A teenage boy combs his hair two healthy ways, A flood of rainwater flowing at his floppy shoes, The rain loosening the oils of the street, Freeing the clenched buds on a plum tree. He combs his hair. Something has to…