Poetry

Anxious for Failure

The zinnias, not blood-red as planned, nudge out strange yellowish blooms, never reach the height the packet claimed. Verbena sprays turn purple where I'd wanted white. Love-in-a-mist foliage spreads, a lovely feathery green, but never buds. I can't stop fiddling with them, watering, urging, staring them down as though I can will them into a…

The Badger Woman

No huckster. She wakes in her earthworks enraged. A bush burns. She grizzles. The whole world turns ash and she gladdens. Mutterous rumbles: beware, soil, repent. She chivvies, nights, digs locks tenacious great jaws in the lair of her skull. She consumes. She maintains her autochthonous visions. There in the roots — look, see what…

Your Father’s Watch

From Boston south he talks of citrus fruit And extra children who pop like extra toes. A good man cuts them off or he makes room. His girlfriend knows that she will never laugh. There is an old man who has lived in shoes, Refinished basements, plastered catacombs Where the cold walls felt like a…

Mime Polyglot

S. P. I say what      mist           may among      pines                      adrift say      what the telling water            leaf to leaf falling      re­            counts      as if in      shorthand as well, too, as what      the mockingbird's piccolo picks out                        repeatedly to                                    keep      in her wet            yet lofty…

Bent Tones

There was a dance at the black school. In the shot houses people were busy. A woman washed her boy in a basin, sucking a cube of ice to get the cool. The sun drove a man in the ground like a stake. Before his short breath climbed the kitchen's steps She skipped down the…

Clocks and Crickets

Crickets in the basement stairwell (funky with leaf-rot, mildew, sweating concrete) screel a daylong prayerwheel with jays and starlings punctuating that chitinous ratcheting. Summer is winding down. On the mantel downstairs a steadier clucking housed in ceramic, and looking like a linoleum-covered Taj Mahal, releases a cogwheel, whirs, bongs, reminds me of Dallie (Miss Valeria…