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Dawn. I was just walking back across the tracks toward the loading docks when I saw a kid climb out of a box-car, his blue jacket trailing like a skirt, and make for the fence. He’d hoisted a wet wooden flat of fresh fish on his right shoulder, and he tottered back and forth like…
This is only a short trip but the horses don't know that blindfolded beneath the deck. They stand tense and steaming, I know their eyes are walled and bright beneath the cloth. Their hard breathing is my asking what should I do? and telling myself nothing. The ship's horn, a sudden shift; it doesn't take…
I can't help but believe the killdeer, so deftly has it led me, dragging its own wings away from a poorly hidden nest before clenching back into flight, and I can't help but believe in a love that would make itself so vulnerable for its young. It is hard to understand, but only by leaving…
for Margitt The name of the boy is Michael, who rows, his sister mans the sail. The storm, the boat, the chorus' call for the boy to row it ashore, hallelujah, slowly sung over. We hear children master this gospel and I wish all sight of the shore the storm estranges that brother and sister…
From the train among row after row of empty buildings you see a single curtained window, an orange bottle on the sill, and a small child's face watching sparks from the tracks. You can only start to answer this after you've passed it, when the train is already pulling into another town where another child…
“You can't step into the same river twice“ —Heraclitus Sometimes you step into a river twice and it's the same river. The sky leans down just to show the importance of sky, Boys on the bridge are throwing rocks, carelessly, at elusive carp in that changeless river. They do not think of the love they…
He slapped her—just once, not hard—when she fainted, and it's the shocked, ashamed way he tucked his right hand inside that pouch between the calf and thigh the body forms when it crouches that makes me sure they have never as much as thought of hitting or getting hit for pleasure, in their secret life….
For years I've been trying to remember my father but strangely I can only recall him as a woman in a red dress, though his picture is still on the wall. His sadness was a long letter in a drawer we never opened, my own sadness a door that would swell and have to be…
Folding the old monopoly board I straighten the piss-yellow $500 bills. If this were real . . . we thought as kids. That sense of possibility is gone though artifacts remain: the dirty string that knotted charms — flat iron, silver shoe, the choo-choo I might have ridden anywhere. These rest in a junkyard sofa…
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