Poetry

  • 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…

  • Freak

    For Byron Burford A child is born with a third eye smack in the middle of his forehead. It's not worth much. He can't see with it, can't ogle with it, he can only blink with it. But this is good enough to get him a job in a freak show so he spends his…

  • The Call

    In religion class we argued about the weather in heaven. Was it always sunny? or did it rain once a century for contrast? I said perfect meant perfect— sky would always be cloudless, the sun at meridian, shining evenly through translucent saints, who, like a stained glass dome, would project their colors— martyr red, hermit…

  • 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…