Poetry

Whose rooftops droop like power lines and tiltingstovepipes cough fibrils of smoke from failing firesthat haven’t given heat since Mondale lost. I knowthe faded NASCAR signs, the velvet robes          of carcasses          on deer hoists          in bow season, and window shades handmade from sheets.This place of Cheez Whiz and knockoff pop.This place where cars on blocksarchitect strange piles in…

We pretended not to see him weeping, the fogclotted in his throat. His filthy coat. Someunforeseen disaster always coming for him.He often went missing, fell asleep in the snow.How could we know? We triednot to see him, flinching at the sun, at whateverloomed above him. The fist of the fathercoming down hard on the head…

A polite town. The mountainswearing purple for our pleasure, clouds holding their snowy breathso everyone’s clueless parentscould get home safe from work.“I’m gonna die here,” Shauna says, her head up against the chain-linksuch that when she angles to catch mein her periphery there’s a red X indented in her brow like a responseon a test,…

More and more, when I’m walking—and it seems I’m walking more and more—I turn around Because something has called to me and more And more it’s me as a child back there, walking with a friend or a ball or both—and he’s happy and that makes me happy, even when he doesn’t Seem to know…

The hour splits with dust somewhere between north and south. A pine tree sways, disappears. A palm tree sways, appears. I am an exile from the California of my childhood. Grass whistles between my father’s grave and mine. The wind raises dust on my mother’s house, cloaking the yard. I listen for water trapped deep…

My father was a brown man. My mother was white. My father was a very brown man. My mother was a very white woman. My father was born in the jungle. My mother was born in an industrial city. My heart, my little lion— It beats faster to say these things Even after all these…

The light isn’t right. The glare from the windows pierces my father’s glasses and he squints as I press the button on my phone. Again, he tells me. Take it again. And I oblige, trying to find a position that would hold him as he is now though he is constantly moving to avoid the…

A tiny scarab landed in my hand. I see how this works. God just shrinks smaller and smaller with every chance you let pass, every opportunity to take the message that the horse delivers, “until God arrives as something, in the end, like you,” I said to the scarab, and with that, as if having…

In truth, who has the energy to be evil? One starts, perhaps, with bar fights, But the dentist bills alone have got to be crazy. Your money’s spent before you’ve begun. And who can actually afford a lair anyway? Wouldn’t we rather have that nice, Three-bedroom, two-bath, with enclosed garage, New roof, and exceptional curb…