Poetry

Ugly is pretty generic (there’s enough to go around), a name flung from the mirror I duck, but I hear what it says: Your living is complete defiance.   All of this was foretold in my history, shaped by storefront living in my latchkey world.   My ugly is alive like a plague bred on…

Here’s how I explain it: my body has had an umbrella open for the last 910 days no, it hasn’t rained at all but I like to be prepared & I like to be   untouched / I might carry this un-superstition with me forever yes, like a child yes, I was terrified after the…

Still it feels shitty, filling a grave. To raise dirt by the spade-full, just piling it on. Our task: plug a hole that holds my best friend’s dad, pack distance     between a corpse and all it cared for. That the rabbi refers to it as a final kindness—a mitzvah—seems amiss, like a door…

It was summer. I was small. My uncle plunked me into his pickup to keep him company on his run for more beer. I was glad to go. He was a loud, belching man who killed bugs for a living. My father’s brother, with three golden teeth. I recall the calm sun, yellow and smeared….

A certain holy, the black nylon  straps becoming funeral dress.   My body, a white shroud   draped over yours. We make   two definitions of the word   bury & let them both lead us  to forget. Your old name,   thrashed down my throat.   Replaced with spitslick & stiff   mythology of rubber. My breath  scented like a car…

As a child I was radiant. The land grew irradiated corn and roses, tomatoes large and abundant. Swallows and catfish carrying the isotopes into the water and woods. The sun rose each day, while the shadows of trees concealed government laboratories where my father worked. I grew up listening to the tap click of the…

The basement floods, but he doesn’t mind. He’s busy as the hundreds of workers you never see in his prints of Inland Steel, those mills that don’t have windows saying the dark is all there is, like Monopoly houses, and blast furnaces, oil tanks and ladders white as lighthouses. Everyone you never see so focused….

It’s the nut house in my imagination. Why Mom and Dad put him away is a mystery. Something about leaving home so you can see it better. He takes a seat in the empty hall. Write about home, they tell him.   Once in a blue moon we meet him for dinner down the block…

Do you remember the two types of eternity, how we learned about them in a Wegmans parking lot, when you turned   on the radio, the classical channel? Why were they even talking about eternity, what   did it have to do with the suddenly broody guitars? You had a peach   Snapple, I remember…