With the flat side of white plastic spatulas three old ladies hunch on a park bench, slapping gobs of blackberry jam onto slabs of dark bread. Nearby a hobo rolls over on his belly, spots the women and thinks just how sweet that jam would taste. Slowly, he gets to his feet. The women do…
with the roof suddenly in worse shape, “structural damage” and my totaled car I need more, you know than any continuing education class can pay for poetry and fiction for three weeks and you could use a break from New York City ice. Listen, we'll start with something like EST— you know how they stopped…
“Sutton,” my wife says, “the girls won't wash between their legs.” What am I supposed to do about it? I think, having just come in from buying round steak that I will try to tenderize with a mallet, then salt and pepper, dredge in flour and fry and serve with green peas, biscuits, gravy. But…
The Nazi within me thinks it's time to take charge. The world's a mess; people are crazy. The Nazi within me wants the windows shut tight, new locks put on the doors. There's too much fresh air, too much coming and going. The Nazi within me wants to be boss of traffic and traffic lights….
Because he'd heard menopause was hard he forgave her the unmade beds, the cold meals— what he couldn't accept was the way she looked: the slip all yanked down below her dress, the hair pasted with grease and sweat to her neck like wet crepe paper. The hospital would have to come and take her….
That's daughter, Orleen, in a tooled-leather frame; she hustles hard in back street bars way north of Nashville and the bus depot where she hollered goodbye. Brown, drowsy eyes and no money down, funneling through hours, a smudge of towns, shut-down mills, courthouse lawns; until the city slammed her awake with Dixieland jazz and the…
Red wax of the apple, small brown pears not yet figured: a perfect day's picking and still an untouched ladder slants under the seckle tree. The ashy-headed geese overhead trembling in a wedge: they too will go down in the hourglass this month, October, dingy Goya! Working until my hands are useless I hear in…
The east coast was west for us, and cold. For sore throats my mother made egg-lemon soup, her face misting over the big pot as it boiled another sea, the oar-shaped ladle lost in steam. Now the yellow lamb broth twirls open like a sunflower when I say “avgo-lemono.” The language breaks on this little…
Cottage in which quiet persuades me I am the only one who has made myself useful, like God beginning to eat his young: One by one like poisoned mice the years smell in the wall. Hell's Peeping Tom with his ruddy face takes a closer look in the hole. At dawn and at dusk, a…
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