To give thanks, after all, for disasters survived, the Mexican artists painted on tin or wood precise scenes of disaster—the crushed bus spilling passengers like pickup sticks, the stillborn child being lifted from the bed, the dancer propped in a plastic corset. Somewhere in the picture—a radiant wheel or a saint's face—was an inkling of…
The motel pool wasn't flat as safety. It gleamed like a twisted muscle under an operating room light in Oyster Bay. 1966. I'm fourteen. From my room I hear a machine buzz at night through the smell of chlorine. I don't know what it does. I lie in bed imagining it forces the gravity into…
Water, bone, bed, bedrock— whatever is underneath, below what's below. Sudden touchable quiet, shadow of a shadow. Weather. Sadness turning ordinary. Nameless illness coming on. A knock at the door so gentle it could be anything. Distance. The just thing not said, or said too late or said exactly and without mercy. Wind rising. Whatever…
Day off in dark suit & hat, looking though the viewfinder of a new eight-millimeter Bell & Howell camera, paying no mind the open windows, the seizure. Just how more than half the targets on the grassy knoll are potential customers, models, women, how accident & aim could fit them all, including the car, into…
Not that you were too young to die, though thirty-five is too young, and not because they killed you in the middle of the night the most premeditated way. Not exactly that you didn't deserve it, either, having shot an old man to death for his rare coins and wasted another for money whose sister-in-law…
Kennedy Playground Washington, D.C. We forced our faces into the circular frame a stringless hoop made, hoping more than silence & light would fall through. We fought for position. We fouled & shoved. We high-fived God. Our Converse All-Stars burned enough rubber to rival The Devil & his mama. Hoop, horseshoe, noose. We aimed at…
Midwinter you can see past the trees, white oaks and tulip poplars, tops golden in the low sun. Today, not a cloud. The old fireroad leads up Old Raggedy, up to boulders and the sheer outcrop silver with snowmelt. What matters lasts a long time: rock, timber, streambeds with predicaments where the water falls. But…
for Thomas Cripps Like a clothesline of whites colored hands couldn't reach, a thousand souls crossed promised air, & the screen glowed like something we were supposed to respect & fear. Daylight & Sunday were outside, waiting to segregate darkness with prejudices of their own. A silhouette behind a flashlight led us down an aisle…
I dream of a crowded street where I break A kiss into your mouth; instead my windows Are darkened with curtains and in fear I want to hide you, your sigh, my hand Cupping your fast breath so those who walk by Will not hear. We do even this honest thing Wrong and lie down…
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