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with knobby elbows is a trick. I'm in this Arkansas truck stop still writhing in pain from the jab she shoved into my funny bone. I have a brittle body, my skeleton impatient, a fast bullet lingering in the heart years after it's lodged. Waiting this long, I've nothing better to do than watch a…
Someday I hope to find the poem that tells me what is wrong with everybody, why the beautiful young girls in horror movies turn to hags whose skin drips from their faces, for instance, or why people drive down the street with looks of unbearable smugness, as if to say, “My kids are better than…
is trying to find a way to get out of town. The people are running at him from all directions. The woman who believed in two is dead in the automatic door at the supermarket. The girl who wrote the report on the power of four is naked and tied to the door in the…
Driving south on U.S. 71 forty miles from Fort Smith I heard a woman speak from the back seat. “You want a good idea for a closing line?” I recognized the voice. “Where did you come from?” “I wiggled in back there when you stopped for gas. You'd better pull over.” She knew about the…
Horses wandered on the beach where waves broke over three bodies with a spray of white lace. The left hand of the first dead kept waving like seaweed in the tide. Two moons crossed the empty eyes of the second dead. And the third, whose lover would not know till dawn, did not hear the…
No salt glaze on a dish is so delicately cracked as are this morning's leaves, shelled in ice. The cherry stones still linked to the tree, the cables of the rose arbor, the hips and myrtle husks and curled threads of the Adam's Needle have clung to the clear thought of ice. Scatterings of ice…
Where has this face grown up before? The tintype glassing in the drawer- What, in this afro-ed cousin's-child? This meristem of sallow cheeks, this Thompson twig of fretted lids, this little hollow to the ribcage? If June and Cedar Grove were gone, still this blithe tune all triplets would play on. Cousin and offspring sit…
I want to remember the cold mornings I spent that winter in the front seat of my uncle's ancient pickup. It was simple work, the two of us waiting for the first signs of light, listening to the steady lisp of snow over the crowns of loblolly pines. We both knew that near us speckled…
And for sure his soul is as good as gone as the frayed ribbon quoting John and now marking a forgotten page in the Analects and at the bottom of the stairs the accumulation of coats in the front closet and now perhaps the need to talk to whoever has rung the bell and rung…
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