Poetry

One by one I throw your empty bottles into the black garbage bag: J&B, Barbella, Cutty Sark, Harvey's, Wild Turkey, Smirnoff. I'd almost forgotten that ritual, when I used to come down here to check up on your stash. And when I did, when I lifted the lid, I wanted to lie down inside and…

A man at the bus stop stooped to retrieve a dime rolling towards the drain. Looking at me, he said with shame, “No ordinary dime, mister.” “Really?” I said, thinking how life is sometimes reduced to a single word, a reflex, a courtesy. Like the time I interviewed this young man for a job in…

The thirsty mule's lips at my ear, I died alongside the river. I died in the media event, with the overhead luggage and antimacassar, my neighbor's dark drink spilled in my lap. I died in the hospital, the waiting room's television full of the Sopworth Camel's excreted black smoke; I died in my favorite armchair…

Friday. Home from school; and the smell of ammonia's so strong it opens the back door for me. The hall floor flicks a long tongue. My socks stick to its shine. Faucet fixtures gleam like new fillings. My fingers breathe on them, leave silver eclipses, and on the stair my footprints leave their imprints on…

Horowitz debuted a Schumann piece in 1928. This new recording is acoustically precise, with a persistent cough from the audience, loud, in two parts, both exhaled sounds (a sharp, then a flat), the second higher and more forceful. It sounds like a man's cough, a mature man in his forties or fifties. You can tell…

Shame kept coming back that year, a broken record, a broken mother leaning in the door, the sunlight behind and through her cotton dress, caressing those places that haven't been caressed in years, thin silhouette of legs, collapsing hips, breasts hanging flat with all the shame they can bare. Even as you're leaving, even on…

The pimply-faced teenager sniffling, slamming the door, who will never kiss a woman's breast till his first gray hair is in. The grown woman nibbling shaved radishes and washing them down with a thimbleful of vinegar. All this and more, against a painted backdrop of skyscrapers, in a time of general abundance and exile. In…

We step onto the lake, empty platter of white. Dark huts dot the drifted, scalloped vastness, huts of the regular men. We go way out and dig, leather mittens lapping the snow. The ice below is a black mirror, black as an animal's eye! I am sure we have found something new that no one…

First the slow dream of bourbon and gasoline Horses bare their teeth as they are herded into boxcars Leaves rustle at the edge of a soccer field Then motorcades drift through clean intersections And the pedestrians stalled if only for seconds Watch their own reflections shrink in store windows Next they throw the plastic down…