Poetry

Ornamental Agony of December

I rake my fingernails across a white flecked beard that conceals a renegade innermost self, that berserk boy who dreamt of lizards climbing out of a fistful of mulberries, who stood his ground and hurled his hundred pounds through glass, who broke down in the corner of the emergency room into a red-eyed heap, shards…

Halloween, The Fifties

After ghosts & goblins Were tricked home early, Dragging cardboard moons in the dust, We older boys became demons. We munched Baby Ruths & Butterfingers Before unearthing our midnight Stash of inner-tube slingshots Beside the opalescent millpond. They uncoiled like water snakes In our hands. We were ecstatic With blue-gray cartons of rotten eggs Resting…

The Scab

In the almost empty dance hall at a corner of Beale, he played guitar with a fat, black bassist and a thin drummer nobody in the audience saw. His hair greasy and stringy, pants with thick red corduroy pleats, he picked the blues indifferently, as though wishing he were asleep, or high, or dead. He…

Double Exposures

99.9% are phony. It's child's play to fake a photo of a UFO. —Carl Sagan Ghostly over the trees, red light, blue light,      a lava-bright glow against the evening mist,           it must look it's hovering in some otherworldly physics, yet perfection      means the photo is a little crude, an amateur's           brilliant luck, Zapruder's grainy fifteen…

Seeing in the Dark

The candle burnt down to a nub of wax cannot be lit. The bulb in the ceiling fixture needs to be changed, everything in this house needs work. She closes the bedroom door to extinguish the hallway light left on for the children's sake. We undress, pants slumped in the chair, a blouse falls to…

Meeting Walter

Breaking and entering, Walter called what he did the night before, and tipped back the bottle of corn whiskey in the cornfield. This bottle he stole, and some jewelry which he threw in a sump. Sumps, he slurred, where the run-off gathers and levels high by morning. Sometimes they'd find a small kid there belly…

Lou Labonte’s Inn

Louis Labonte in the fourth grade had a cherub's round smile, Bugs Bunny teeth, and his father owned Lou LaBonte's Inn, perched on a high embankment, three white-shingled stories, facing the snowed Sierra in all seasons for those who cared to look. Behind was the Weimar Sanitorium, which for many years helped victims of tuberculosis…