At your feet, I am a shoemaker’s apprentice, Toxic in a long day of fumes. I’m listening To the fluorescent light come on In April, an Isadora flinging her hot white scarf Across a month mottled by the chemicals Of Daylight Savings Time, in the spokes of the wheels Of hormones turning in the unseasoned…
Gone to seed, ailanthus, the poverty tree. Take a phrase, then fracture it, the pods' gaudy nectarine shades ripening to parrots taking flight, all crest and tail feathers. A musical idea. Macaws scarlet and violet, tangerine as a…
We never had a cabin in the woods. We never had a yard, a dog, a child. We never lived in the same neighborhood. We never ate, half-naked, on a tiled terrace over the vineyards in Languedoc, or drank milkshakes on the toweled front seat of that fifth-hand Chevy pickup truck whose gears required a…
Two lovers met. It wasn't lovers' lane, But a lesser traveled road. No others came. One lover held the other's hand. The other Man was me. I watched as if I hovered Far above the scene. And as the sky Began to prickle with the stars, I tried To understand why the other couldn't free…
1985 Rain. Ten years since we have spoken. Since Ma's suicide, fifteen. Triage of families: who to attend to—the widowed, the childless, the orphaned? When you smashed the kitchen radio all the calm times you played piano went dead too, just another symptom, though you swept up before sending me to my room. On those…
The question he so casually raises, hand fisted on slim hip, is What endures? The small terra-cotta figure shows the rough brown beneath the smooth black in random places; a chip on his shoulder, a small bite taken from the stylish behind. But he endures, gracefully. More than that: mockingly. No one his age should…
Father, this night As on so many other nights I envy you. Not as an infatuated child Is jealous of his father— When I was a child I desired your strength; What I saw as your intelligence; A thousand small skills That I have never made my own— I try to imagine The disintegration of…
Eulene’s lover wakes with a start. Something missing: woman, money, watch, gun. His life deciduous as October at the business end of a pawn ticket. He’s always been embarrassed by cross hairs and calibers and the biggest hits by the Sex Pistols. “Step on Your Watch” the last song before the radio signed off. His…
1. Heroic Measures My friend deals with each new wrinkle in his illness as if it weren't one more step toward the inevitable catastrophe. Always a loner (he claims), he's now tasting the sweetness of friendship for the first time. His thirty-year writing block dissolved: grim, heartbreaking poems—pulled, he says, from the “iron jaws” of…
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