Poetry

Sometimes all the meanness in our house condenses to thick smoke: the black-lettered words from our fights, gray mist of barely nasty thoughts, the chemical grimness of our meals, oils secreted while screaming, even the runny filth of our son's diapers steams into our faces like fog from some poisoned sea to blind us, choke…

In heartland cafeterias, I hear the resolute chirp of women heaping pale food on white platters, tuna surprise, baby corn niblets, flash-frozen cod, potatoes whipped, ridged, stuffed, mashed, washed down with peach cobblers, coconut pie, sighing under vanilla ice cream in a scoop, and loaves, wafers, snaps, strips, squares, puffs, crullers, cakes, guests at the…

You'd think we'd be used to it, but it's an odd party, all of us in one room, the world in the other, language in its white gloves circulating with finger-foods and billets-doux—for you? For you? What to do but take its word for things —our humble servant, our only foreign correspondent, making some kind…

Like an accordion, a plastic, penicillin-green curtain stretched and cordoned off the room, aluminum handles disappearing with a click into the wall. Mrs. Hansen then nodded behind her bifocals as Theresa Mills stood unaspiringly in front of the corkboard, bleeding crucifix, and flag to read out loud the first chapter from our Social Studies text,…

I know the place where her body was found. In a tidepool near the fishing rocks where the children once caught a starfish. They placed the starfish in a pie plate filled with an inch of brine. For days it writhed but so slowly the arms didn't seem to move like hour hands on clocks….

Last night my wife brought my son into bed, to sleep between us fitfully, his hunger having startled him awake. He kneaded the air then held on fast to my finger. All day I'd walk from some new anger or other, trace my own steps, imagine wrongs. I'd walk room to room forgetting things— table…

How little they ask of the stale winds of traffic— even of the picked-over plots of dirt, the pyracanthas whose sun-red berries will not reappear for months. And so they range on the crust of faith at the edge of all their days— no fields south to fly to, no other life but this. 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…

Dizzy from cross-country flying I dumped my imitation leather suitcase on the king-sized bed, then walked out through the marble lobby towards a doorman dressed as a Tudor knight. What a rotten job he's got! I thought. But I wore a silly outfit, too— a polyester business suit meant to make me look like profs…