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…
There was the bank and mud sloped into a sandbar and what do you care? Spare hooks in a shirtpocket, nightcrawlers crammed in soil in a canning jar. Supper, among your mother's family, was over. Her sister went on and on about how poor the past was. Their father's overalls, grime, cuffs futile to try…
It's two am and I awake feeling you've just left some small diner. I imagine wind swinging through the door, voices closing behind you. I remember your last employer saying you've left for he doesn't know where, a woman in a motel angrily waving an unpaid bill; I've been content most of my life with…
1. It angers me: the cold snap and freak ice storm that's wrecked my yearly pilgrimage home. Coming far from my northern province, I miss the perfume of the cape jasmine, and I want to smash the hard mush of tomatoes in paint cans on the porch against the white house and axe the crackling…
A boy stumbles forward in the bus each morning as his father, young and bearded, with a long body, holds the door. Slowed by a snowsuit and questions which must get asked, he allows people to catch and help him, their smiles lasting several stops down the road. In my lap, my neice speaks to…
There's no moon and it's a curse, my heart beating slow like a bad accident. We're searching for Bill's bird dog in the reeds and it might as well be bones I part with my hand, bending over the long pale grass my eyes aching like thin tails of light the dory lamps leave on…
Ignoring your poor prognosis, we set grief aside and at dusk behind the Met climbed slowly towards the obelisk where, resting a while, we might in time's pinched frame lavishly survey spring's blossoming. You were so eager for smell— nose in the first bloom at hand— like the hummingbird with his shrewd apparatus you drank…
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