Poetry

My mother and her friends fit into the sockets of the no-color sky, tilted ocean sky. The salt-filmed air — a plagiary of the air condition in the mill where they work: its measure of exact seams, the quick symmetrical rhythm of eight precise motions. I am older than she is here in her zip-back…

1 I know all that's wrong with coveting your neighbor's life, but I want the one I've invented for this couple in front of me in line at the license bureau. I can see the pulse in his temple, the faint down along her jaw. But I can't understand their constant murmurings, so practiced they…

Between his crib slats the baby fed on them, a man, a woman, the white sheet they turned to, the vows, the sweats, they traded, gulping. Afterward, someone in shadow got up, put on the falling light, first footsteps of the rain, returning only to help prepare their supper. The other dozed before the window's…

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…