Poetry

Territory

Under the shade of the mulberry trees, he leans through the DeSoto's rear window arranging samples of carpet and tile, moulding and cove base, furniture brochures and carpet tack with its blue nails as gnarled as shark teeth, and then he stacks the odd suitcases of carpet squares, front-to- back, back-to-front, their plastic handles clicking…

Skimming

It was nothing more than a summer job, hopping the low fence to my neighbor's house where I paid out the long hollow pole through my hands, and dipped the skimmer's blue jaw into the pool to strain the insect wings, bird feathers and carob leaves that lay like the night's siftings on a huge…

Love on Ives Street

I. The landlord's daughter speaks of it in Portuguese as if she were eating a flower. On the corner, her slender arms crossed like the words of caution whispered between sisters, she watches cars slide by with an intelligent eye, studies their shapes as abstracts of possible entanglements. Only her father's house has a garden,…

Visit to the Prison Farm

No cows in summer's last alfalfa behind the chainlink fence topped with barbed wire— a fence just higher than a man, while in the duty room—clean, without the septic smell of public asylums and painted primary green— two inmates back from Work Release slap and rattle a Coke machine, younger than I'd hoped men doing…

Gruel

Your name is Diana Toy. And all you may have for breakfast is rice gruel. You can't spit it back into the cauldron for it would be unfilial. You can't ask for yam gruel for there is none. You can't hide it in the corner for it would surely be found, and then you would…

Fishing Seahorse Reef

Our lures trail in the prop-wash, skipping to mimic live bait. Minutes ago I watched you cut up the dead shrimp that smell like sex. Now we stand, long filmy shapes jigsawed by the waves, and wait for the rods to arc heavy with kingfish. We bring the limit of eight on board, their teeth…

Joseph Carr (1917- )

Out of the old noon sun still lifting            wraiths from morning's gully,      the phoebe's call assails the barn—      its shingles are nearer the heart of gray in the shadows of those deep            eaves. Summer, the huckster,      wends over Blinn's Hill, having sold      snippets of blue thread, a needle, some ribbon, perhaps a pan…