Poetry

Side with Stars

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,…

Fish Pier

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…

Open Casket

In the pink light of the funeral parlor they spread her out, the arc of a lamp overseeing the calm colors of her folded hands. How far away from us she lies in the big, serious casket like a creche, holding as it does her babied corpse. Visitors in clumps of twos and threes sway…

Beautiful is Hard

To be a boy meant it was only easier to pee in the woods or from a rowboat easier to fit into tight jeans the crooks of trees except for some fat boys and some flat-bellied flat-buttocked girls. To be a boy meant it was always harder to have a beautiful anything: like eyes, handwriting,…

Cumana In August

Cumana in August is not so bad. True, it's winter and the days get shorter. But not because the sun does. Because the rain comes earlier and earlier until one is almost back in his home by noon. The mountains are worse. Invierno: winter wet, summer hot. The rivers swell, creciente; from upriver down, dark…

A Fresco

All day I've been thinking of the grief on each of their faces, Adam and Eve. The feeling is closest to a wave as it peaks, how it seems on the verge of self-consciousness before it collapses. Their mouths hold a single sound that divides, familiar as rain. The angel points away from the green…

On Being Photographed

—for Bill Aron Iris to iris, all these clicks should parcel out a single ribbon of behavior into chapters of a person. Trying not to try, I try a grin which over-ages into grimace, just as the shutter steps aside. O look, a butterfly, a butterfly! Oh no, too late. Someone, please help me not…

David

He played a paralyzed man once, before I knew him. He made his own body settle into a position of broken readiness, hunched on the rotting pins of his bones. I thought I'd seen it before: actors in wheelchairs as actors in wheelchairs. But he gave that damage power, a sound in the throat that…