Poetry

Lying full-length in a porcelain bathtub in Billings, Montana, lit shadows of amoeboid forms feeling their way across my breasts, the day replaying its life as though near death: the naked body of my lover's daughter picking her steps along the rim of the lake, a goddess of the heat and sage; the sudden arising…

Down by the river the furnances are big enough to make you believe in steel and the eternal light bulb, the stamina of Northern cities orphaned by the winter. There's a man who muscles the switches for the two hopper cars, and the donkey engine hammers them up the siding. Coal leaks through the frost-eaten…

He was struck by the pure unstinting radiance, the light blazing so fiercely on the iron railings he had to shield his eyes, the sky above the Hudson hard and clear: the skyline, pink at the edges, gouged out with a knife. And the light was everywhere. It blazed in the window of the barbershop…

     It must have happened like this: *     *     * My mother went to the hospital with a lump in her breast. The doctor did a biopsy. It wasn't malignant. They were trying to protect me so nobody said anything. *     *     * Sometime not too long after that a lady came to the door with the seven danger signs….

During the blizzard we pulled off the road for a bite to eat. We could see the word FOOD in the neon haze from the highway. As we approached, it became clear the place was no truck stop, as it was tastefully decorated with artificial palms gently swaying, & Latin rhythms punched through the crystal…

1 I was seven that fall in Chicago Heights—we'd lived there a year. Under cirrus clouds and the white convulsions of noon I prowled the fields, elated. I butted down the rocky slope on my sled. each time a step closer to the ditch. Outside was the only place to be. The city streets of…

Agnus Dei, Holy Ghost or devil, lambent tongues of knowing skip across the desert skin. 3 A.M. I sit up straight, wait it out in bed awake, bring the twin soles of my feet together barely just till each becomes the reach & touch of self & other. A stranger's kiss. I press then, press…

A stray cat from the next field over, hungry, finds her way to the feed bowls inside our tool shed, atop the deep freeze. Our tom lets this happen, then moves, low to the ground, into position, crouching outside, staring at the only escape.      Too frightened now to eat, she too stares at it, neither…

The proper word would be “ceded”— I have gone completely over to the other side. You wouldn't know me in my pressed brown shirt and tie clip. You wouldn't know me with that white paste swirled across my scalp. Did you find me in the group picture I sent? Row AA—a mile from the left?…