Poetry

The blue light of the teevee glowed on our blue faces. Ray Charles sang of Georgia on his mind. “His mind? That nigger doesn't have a mind!” Grandmomma said. She threw her tatting down on her lap, hawked once, dipped snuff, and glowered at the teevee set. “Damn niggers taking over teevee. You can't watch…

I feel cloudy, stumble often, knock my skull on the roof of the car getting in because I'm having a stint of daydreams. In one it's raining, weeks of it, then for no reason sunlight returns fingersnapping through trees. In this one it's Paris, a lonely attic, I remove a letter from its ragged envelope…

Huge drowsy yellow jackets rose out of the sick-sweet stink of fruit— a tub of scuppernongs wedged in between me and my uncle. He said, “Hold that tub steady. Don't let her tip.” He drove and boasted of his new air pump and how only fools would pay full retail price. And when the wasps…

Eight hours on my feet at Joe's Pizzeria and I know inside this on-again, off-again red pulse of an arrow pointing toward the tunnel my whole body wants to become. Joe slams down the grate and we're gone, out on the street where the neon craving of a train shudders into darkness beside the art…

The crook-legged articulation of insects among grass blades, thin spiders hurrying their side-wise straddle, and the multi-colors of flies, green and blue, the glint of compound eyes, Dragon and Damsel flies landing: the weight and thrum; the occasional bewildered grasshopper, a knifing of air; a glimmer of gnats or of Mayflies clustered, their quick cobweb…

That was the winter the city hired two guys to demolish by hand our neighbor's arsoned house— chimney, foundation, beams on the second floor. All January they worked with a tea kettle whistling on a trash fire, a boom box full of James Brown “feeling good.” I didn't, sitting in my coat cheering through a…

for Ann Elliott The day you gave birth a man who'd had a nervous breakdown five years earlier was showing me his cellar: around us garlic tresses hissed, groomed and crisp, holding their cargo inward, as you and I traveled through years, countries and lovers, exotic lives looking for real love or what would make…

Dearest K., I dream of houses burning, skeletons of houses, row upon row of charred frames of houses crumbling like the ash of a cigar. I walk the streets as if their planned and crisscrossed patterns could contain a human life, as if that life would not spill over. How long have you been dead?…

My cousin's kids are here—or near and living with Aunt Cyn. They can't win. They can't believe their father's dead. Nor I. Why, at Mother's funeral only months ago he said. Have some kids! Lose some weight! Wear better clothes! (Always the Parisian to my hippie.) His kids were what he lived for! Six months…