Poetry

None Other

Matthew 27.50,51 What can still bleed is not yet food. In the ninth hour Jesus howled and his wounds' crusts were opened. Blood repainted its dried trails. He felt the scourge's language on his back burn for interpretation, final insight, some emphatic look into the memoirs of the Cruel, the Other. But none came. His…

Sleepwalking

For a while it happened that Koslowski, a notorious sleepwalker, would leave his bed every night, wander through the harbor areas, return somehow, and in any case wake up utterly filthy in the cellar on a pile of coal and briquettes. In order to out-smart himself, so to speak, Koslowski has lately taken to lying…

Applications

Last night, when drunken cries and ugly music poured from open windows of apartments, and the street outside my door was echoing with shouts of boys and girls in open cars, I typed my application, cheerfully, for a teaching job up in Alaska. Who cares if night lasts half a year as long as cold…

At Your Hanging

The hangman weeps. He kneels and begs forgiveness of your shoes. OK, OK, you nod, and your headbag's spice, its tropical jute bouquet, grows subtler, like some wine you are adrift in. This the hangman frantically understands, and everyone here, in sunlight and authentically ash-blackened sackcloth, deeply feels. Now we lay us down to dream…

Self-Portrait

Koslowski, decades ago, glued a photo of himself, the only one which exists, by the way, over the mirror in his bathroom, the only mirror in his apartment. Since that day he has painstakenly avoided ever looking into another mirror. Because of this, Koslowski today has only a vague idea of what he looks like,…

Some Gangster Pain

Eunice is tired of pain, everyone else's. She wants some gangster pain, to strut her thick ivories in a collision of dreams, the pajamas-to-work dream, the magnolia siege dream. What ya got there. Eunice, say Johnny and the boys. Eunice lives behind the bus, another fleeing place, riot of exhaust. She doesn't have much to…

The Donation

The ten-car Interstate collision has shucked me from the body. My little heat ascends toward space, and now, under the surgery theater lights, they are lifting out my usable parts to be reinstalled, to keep some stranger going awhile. Goodbye, old heart, old greased purple fist. Keep slugging, just one more inevitable rejection. So long,…

Immaculatus

Koslowski belongs to that tiny group of people who came into being through immaculate conception. “Whether in my case too the Holy Spirit had a hand in it, or perhaps even God in Heaven, I just don't know,” Koslowski mentioned to friends. In any case when he was younger and slept with his natural mother…

Alias

In sunglasses like dark lakes I like the way the car capsules me from conversation, the smell of the day burning. I write home, “Wind through the door is in any house, land from a window a hard pie.” It was a good house. Shutters, soup. One day in the mailbox the face on the…