There are certain lies I need to tell you. I hope that they are successful. Not that the lies are successful, but what I am saying behind the lies will be. There are certain things I want you to know about me. Not that I am good and kind, I am those things and I…
On the J train, a gun swung toward the wide-eyed messenger with a crippled hand, the gunman a burly man with sunglasses tells witnesses “Be cool,” the bullet shattering a window after ripping the heart apart. At the Canal Street station, slowly up the steps, head down, he's vanished into Chinatown. Rush hour. Chilled September…
1. After the Reformation had settled the loamy soil and the lettuce-green fields of dollars, the clouds drifted away, light fell on the grass blooming from the sunny snow, and a red barn stood out on a hill with scattered hemlocks and white pine and the shut gate of a picket fence. * * * From the…
And there was my mother, toward the end she wore only a man's pajama top and a diaper. And one morning I went to her, because it was my turn, and I leaned over her bed, which now had a rail, and I prayed, “Please, please don't let me hurt her.” And I started to…
NYC, December 1990 He nose col's he ass but he don' know an' he ain' got no elbow t' practice tellin' things apart. Brass monkey-balls fallin' off— it so friggin' col’. I ain' got no snow-head: I c'n see whole town's in a hurry git t' where it's warm 'n' coffee 'n' hot things to…
I. When my brother died, a stranger drove his gray flocked coffin none of us chose, across the country to the cemetery plot. On top of the box were propped someone else's flowers, dead a day sooner. Brown-edged, they stank, …
The walk home is later and so it happens in darker light. Such a wind on the face, on the glamorous graveyard, the city with its bronze horses and their men, and the white stone shrines light up at night like jewels. The air is less supple, less fecund here. The bats are out. In…
We beat our silver pans to chase the horse back to the woods. Our good white horse— we never fed her, or praised her, or rode her, white as the round moon, this old—ancient— one. Why, mother moon, do we chase her away? Because, foolish, no oats in the bin, no oats in the bin,…
Female in the afterlife, Rimbaud, photographed sits, beautiful in the waste (a dress, a chair a tent among junked cars). How lovely the feminine muscles of his arms But he is relaxed. No longer does a human soul, like a shining noose, trail from heaven (still, absentmindedly, he reaches…
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