Poetry

My sister is doing her exercises, working out in my husband's study. The rowing machine sighs deeply with every stroke, heavy breathing, like a couple making love. Even my humming can't shut it out. She's visiting from Iowa where the cold weather is much worse. When she was ten, I'd hear her strumming her guitar…

Her car isn't turning over and she wishes She had a new one. Once she had a boyfriend Who wore a silly cap when he fixed things— Sometimes with parts left over—but they didn't Like each other's friends so now he's gone. She wishes things didn't end the way they do. She wonders if it's…

Because she feels her husband in this breeze Riffling her blouse and housedress, She's outside in the early days of peace. While the sun freckles her arms in Texas, Rows of lights glow on the British airstrips, And Americans drink tea brown as deerskin. She forgives the Soho whores, conjuring instead His high cheekbones and…

The Cohen twins. I wish I could erase them! The two demons . . . never more demonic than when on their way to Catholic School in Hyde Park in their uniforms, the blousy white shirts and gray slacks and medallioned blazers they never removed even after school, and wore even on that fatal—final—afternoon. ….

The night was almost too long to bear. Then there was evidence of mercy—a passing car— milky air—and I could see dry walls & gravel on the way to a highway Atlantic for its grays. Loss is the fulfillment of the Law. Space collected on a long line. I was eliminated as a locus of…

The glass of water between them did not bar, ban or challenge their fevered conversation. But soon the glass shape disappeared and the water became a serious ocean, a sexy flow and barren. This endless gap, pitch and drowning water sprays up these facts: he was just a boy and she a thriving woman; he…

Tourniquet tight, spade vein rising, I must have done it Three or four times before I realized it was me easing the needle Into my vein. My friends crouched, waiting for their turn, Our eyes fixed on the plunger slowly pressing down. It was as close as I'd ever felt to anyone, those moments We…

You catch my breath with your waking a calf moves closer to its mother (slumbering) some brother leaves his home to bring me what I need. It doesn't work & I call you back— Sugar—I call you Sugar no rest in my slumber no sugar in my bowl

Once we snuck in to look at it, late, after the choir director had gone, after Mrs. Wilson had changed her organ shoes, clapped them in her black bag and turned out the sanctuary lights. Then we crept back into the nave, dark swelling the high ribs, the carpet swallowing our footfall. Streetlight fell red…