Poetry

Broken screen—cicadas drill through the gauzy scent of orange blossoms heavy over the grove.            One gangly mantis clambers out of the queen's wreath, kneels over a jewel-backed beetle.                  I lie back. on bare tile, my hair swaddled in threadbare folds of old towels.      The maker coats my face with a thin clear…

for Michael Trombley Single file out of Hebrew history class in bow ties and jackets, skull caps and double-knotted shoes. I didn't want to sit for hours and pray to a foreigner in a foreign tongue. I wanted to cross the street to the elevator, opening on the Viola Gensler School of Ballet, the perspiring…

for my father My brother and I watched pigeons on warm evenings tip like paper boats, dipping a wing, then right themselves on the bumpy air, soaring out over the arc of the Atlantic. At the window, on rainy days, waiting for you to get home through traffic, we heard their perishing cries. Sometimes we'd…

The afternoon he explained how the concertina worked, his hands slightly plump but agile at the keys as they squeezed its delicate black lung, I would have said he was kind. Certainly he was shy. Conversing with him was always work, and, though willing to try, he clearly preferred his complicated silences, retreating to a…

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…

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…

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…

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…

They left my hands like a printer's Or thief's before a police blotter & pulled me into early morning's Terrestrial sweetness, so thick The damp ground was consecrated Where they fell among a garland of thorns. Although I could smell old lime-covered History, at ten I'd still hold out my hands & berries fell into…