Poetry

Grandmother said her grandmother unwrapped the knives & forks each meal, backward-walking to the cabin she left. She remembered her dishes on the shelf, a book, her feather bed. The way sun dusted the floor. Soldiers could come again & push her on a trail in the dead of winter. After the removal she started…

When you collapsed on the roof in the heat I dragged you down the shingles, the cedar splitting, your blunt fingers and hands with their old bashes and scars, thudding against my arms, banging the wood. The sky that clear blue space in the flame backed off like an open palm.            I slid you…

Herself She was most of all herself with the children who touched her arm without thinking as if fingers had a life of their own who liked her who listened to her joke and gave back appreciation and could whoop who finished in the tub a song she started at the stove. As much her…

1. Ties At the old Hawthorne station my eyes track him on the rails: a double shining. Inside new voices post arrivals, departures and I remember East Cleveland homecomings, familiar trembling on the platform soon to be a stage, my father at center in his unyielding gray tweeds. The rumble at my feet. And I…

Like the small sound from across chain link, your briarhopper neighbor taking a long pull on a Bud then splashing a little on his hibachi that smokes like an old box camera, and spraying, too, his pale wife wearing a zebra-print halter over breasts full of sway and collapse, who ricochets back and forth, back…

There is a sweet in it though suite is what they said not taffy wrapped in a paper twist. I don't always hear well or want to and see Chicks Singing in Their Shawls painted on a bread truck. What it might have said I can't think. A sweet in it. A lean professor processes…

How should they look, Indians, California Indians, Streaming down the red dirt road, Igneous dirt, past my mother's Family's house? How should they Look in 1922? Should They be dirty, poor, straggly Unfortunate things, hair matted, Dragging discarded fragments Of cloth, clutching beads Of the cheapest gaudiest Glass? Or should they look heroic, Movie version,…

For days the last day has burned the palm like a rough rope and each child vibrates with escape, dreaming past the swing and collide of bees in heavy sunlight. The mountain ash drags its silver knuckles against the window pane. The nuns glisten and continue. In Polish accents they say what heaven says, this…

The leaves all blaze, a fireplace's commonplace crimson and gold, the vines become scrawls of a letter hidden from someone — parents, your spouse, or other lover — between newpapers in the kindling bin or only accidentally fallen into flames, and, worse, your only memory of the address is vines black upon leaves blackening after…