Poetry

Pony Express

Some would have you think the Pony Express is dead. Don't believe it. It's only waiting. You know the letter you thought of writing to that woman you once loved, the one describing how you remembered her hair or hands or the curve of her chin? That's the sort of letter they now deal in,…

Pentimento

It will always be just love, spider failure, curious, worn dead life, home in September, far from all love. The radiant agent of the breast is my express, my station of pentimento, my erasure of the hemmed. My sad dream when my eyes said I do not love you, as good as we are. In…

Spider Web

There are stories that unwind themselves as simply as a ball of string. A man is on a plane between New York and Denver. He sees his life as moving along a straight line. Today here, tomorrow there. The destination is not so important as the progression itself. During lunch he talks to the woman…

Committing Sideways

This might hurt a bit, stabbing away at conversation when we could be quiet or snoring, I mean waking up sick is tomorrow's business; (we like to say that it wears our clothes). But what's substantial is the soulful intersection of the needs and obligations of good friends ridiculing each other. It's a chance we…

The Collector Calls

Gifts of garbage, rare junk sink into the corners of each room. I circle around the empty faces of dolls; doll legs, doll heads and doll hands full of sand litter the dark floor, each undusted shelf edging masquerade of nature's giving-in: bottles the color of black ice, tin cans tortured from art, a cat's…

How To Like It

These are the first days of fall. The wind at evening smells of roads still to be traveled, while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns is like an unsettled feeling in the blood, the desire to get in a car and just keep driving. A man and a dog descend their front steps….

A Terrible Disappointment

Koslowski has been, as far back as he can remember, utterly convinced thay he would one day be one of the three best violinists in Europe. But when, at the age of 36, he held a violin in his hands for the first time, he, as he told his friends confidentially, “almost broke out in…