Poetry

My father smoked a pipe,loved to stare in the camera’s eye,make of it a twinkle or a wink,those were the days of ginand tonic, those were the dayswhen he believed in the magicof his fertile brain—they calledhis body genius, the masteryover bat and ball, the lithein his walk, the musclesof youth—and in his brain,sparing, alert,…

in that realm, a man of straw can pass for a man. sleep him in the woods on a horse’s skull—skull so he dreams of echoes, horse so his heart learns to gallop. unlearn him the language of his starving mother, pull his shoulders back, and he’ll swagger. he’ll see a blooming meadow and think,…

When you were torn from me, summer gleamed like glass and teemed down in hot, silvery,          perfect beads. And I could not bear to be touched. Not by the silk of skin I was swathed in, not by the rain          which shattered, then regrouped, unharmed. Rain everywhere like the touch of a man who wants so much…

the way the light does the cells inside the skinor as the water does deep inside the veinof the leaf, alone in the oblong tub my toeturned the tap, newly wed to this interior.It was the year we touched no onebut each other night after night,season after season, and then another spring.

This was the summer of kitchen stove burners full of tin foil,my family’s women circling esfand smoke around the house. Our neighbor Mike was still a decade away from raping a woman.I still knew nothing of the pocketed jewelry, the body left for dead. I still rode bikes to the candy mansion with the neighborhood…

—after Bobby Chacon   only criminals                      fight for money           are committed                     to this thing to get money                                         to get enough                     to serve seven years                               & I’ve paid                           & I didn’t have the money                              the kids                               for my crimes     if I didn’t have                   to serve to get money                     my family                               I’d…

after Bobby Chacon   that’s all it was                                         just fighting   out of my head                                         doing whatever   it took to reach him                                         there was no real plan   it was whatever it took                                         fighting him was it   all fighting no head                                         just to reach that’s all   no head just doing                                         my plan…

after Bobby Chacon     it’s with you all the time like a wife it will know if you don’t treat it right but if you treat it right it can be good like a wife it’s with you all the time you treat her right you know if you don’t treat her right a…