Poetry

Sharing spice cake and green tea, Around the round table In the walled garden, The man with the thick black hair And the seated women in blue Have something in common. It's not the rings on their fingers Or the gold in their teeth, Or that they share the same flatwear And plates of bone…

Past the turpentine camps, brilliant green lamps held by woozy militia men, the car with a nose of its own, with headlight-eyes, sniffs through the mountain fog, heart palpitating, belly hungry for gasoline pancakes. Ghettos rave in their sleep, butchering alto solos, harvesting white snakes. The car, evermore threadbare, feels lost on Chevrolet Avenue, a…

So many churches against the sky, a small view beyond where a corner of the sea converges with an even smaller landscape, the spit less than motionless, as in a dream where there's flame but not fire, where a child's cap blows slowly across the street, where the land ends where the street ends, and…

I took for the dawn The steelmills of Gary Burning their corner of the night. But I was wrong. Dead wrong. At four am the sky takes on These willful transformations. To keep awake, I sing off-key The fading staticky tunes, A dj's voice a thousand miles near. My life has never been more In…

“Before placing me on your shelf, please take me by the feet and give me a few hard shakes to help restore that ‘just made’ look. Thank you.” I have been carrying these instruc­ tions around in my pocket for weeks, pulling them out at odd moments. I found them on the street and I…

I bought gasoline and ink (I did not buy booze, I did not buy the moon, I can no longer afford the moon). But moon moon what did you buy? A mosquito with a net, a plaything (air), a lantern lit by gasoline for your other side, side with stars, side by side with streams,…

Thousands of codfish Glitter in open Cases. They look So still on beds Of ice, I tiptoe Around them. Gutted, Dead instruments, They will not trill The high or low Seas again. They lie Quiet as knives. They, too, were feared By their lessers, Squid and mussels. Still, these losses move me little. Tomorrow they'll…

There was nothing to do on the island. The dogs chased glass lizards into the dense myrtle bush. I don’t know how the children slept. Men and women did what they could to extin­ guish the brightness of the stars.   One night my own supply of rum ran out, and I paced the verandah…

No one holds my silent mornings like a vase, the card for unhappiness represented by a single teardrop hovering over the vase. Aunt Vase, I call it, while Aunt Linda focuses on the golden sun as she centers my reading for me. But what I remember best is the snake in the grass, pronounced as…