“Dead Confederate Solder” —Gardner, Catalog #554 Around him is battlefield litter, dew-swollen lumps of a spilled powder. What is it? And the strips of cloth. Left behind the lines of men that advanced or fell farther on or hid somehow on this trampled field of Maryland grass. By chance, at the extreme upper edge of…
Off work and going upslope for a look I left the plans—to see the view Their money bought—weighted with a rock, And trampled a path of parted weeds Past pampas, nettles, Poison oak bristling in the breeze, A weathered two-by-four nailed high up in a cedar's fork, A haggard pair of panties waving stiffly from…
The sun widening its skirt, catching the trail the ducks leave as they glide across the water . . . if you belived. . . widening until it's made a window in the wall of cloud, an opening between this world and that other made wholly of light, which we must take on faith. On…
Fifteen feet from shore a seal's pug head, then slick cigar body jerks up, vanishes under the surface as your voice rises this is why we're here isn't it? Something I forget often and with great accuracy. Until the world jars me— this seal, or, night after the lunar eclipse, when we sailed under a…
Now my friend is among the dying who pace Commercial Street, jeans bunched at his ass & hung from skeletal legs. Flesh shrinks & shrinks away, until it seems only his bones promenade the street. I have averted my eyes from his eyes. I have stared straight in as his eyes sink further back &…
At the end there were straws in her glove compartment, I’d split them open to taste the familiar bitter residue, near the end I ate all her Percodans, hungry to know how far they could take me. A bottle of red wine each night moved her along as she wrote, I feel too much, again…
When I am dead with you, fastened up, enameled, dried on a hot stone and dropped in a well to float with the other dead, not knowing them, not knowing any name or step or skin, when I am part of Law with you, and have the terror of restless movement worn away, so that…
He reads my latest attempt at a poem and is silent for a long time, until it feels like that night we waited for Apollo, my mother wandering in and out of her bedroom, asking, Haven't they landed yet? At last Dugan throws it on the table and says, This reads like a cheap detective…
Old hands take her infant eyes. Her hair comes to the razor, lips and teeth retreat, her fingers snap, her legs and arms and tongue unsocket. So the bed is dry of flesh. The bones are whispered to. The sister by the window etches hairlines, pulls the blue thread through the handbones, footbones, boils a…
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