Poetry

Mornings Like a Vase

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…

The Face in the Ceiling

A man comes home to find his wife in bed with the milkman. They're really going at it. The man yanks the milkman off by his heels so his chin hits the floor. Then he gets his gun. It looks like trouble for all concerned. Why is modern life so complicated? The wife and milkman…

Made In Holland

Pigtails fiddles with my riverbed, she shoots some plutonium up my harpsicord. I am here in Holland up a nut tree. I walk the shopping mall in my pajamas. My cologne seems to intoxicate everyone. Deluded cattle walk out of the barbershop saying things like “Nice pajamas,” and “Didn't I see you at the golf…

The Family

I decided to never worry again when I could not see the stone, I decided the sky was there, even in the skyless night even when the family name awoke and roamed. The family name made so much noise! like the sea which had buried some other blood some other box of clothes which washed…

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…