Poetry

  • Short Story

    My grandfather killed a mule with a hammer, or maybe with a plank, or a stick, maybe it was a horse — the story varied in the telling. If he was planting corn when it happened, it was a mule, and he was plowing the upper slope, west of the house, his overalls stiff to…

  • Stories from the train

    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…

  • The Inner Circle

    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….

  • Poem

    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…

  • Moving Days

    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…

  • Sioux River

    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…