Poetry

I am afraid & so I run. If I wave a white flag, he’ll kill me, If I fight, I’ll die, I run Falling inside every stride. Where is the hero? Where Is my swift horse? Achilles is a tiger, a tank, a raging fire, Every fear I ever had In one. I run. The…

Sometime late late last night, after polishing off Two bottles of Millésime 2004 to mark our 25 wedding anniversary And consequently finding ourselves dazed in bed Face to face eyelids drooping with both reading lamps blazing, Almost but not quite unconscious yet, I wanted to exclaim as I once did Something seriously corny, like You…

Four a.m., nothing moving, no hurry, dawn still has time to be choosy selecting its pinks. But now a breeze brushes across me—the way my skin is cooled off by the evaporation of sweat, this artistry, this system sombers me: when I am blown from the body of life will it be refreshed? I dread…

We know that somewhere far north of here the two rivers Ba and Ab converge to form this greater stream that sustains us, uniting the lifeblood length of our lands: and we believe that the Ba’s source is heaven, the Ab’s hell. Daily expeditions embark upcountry to find that fork, to learn where the merge…

There are too many characters in this book I’m reading. I can’t keep track of them all. How can I care who marries who, or what they wear? Nevertheless, each time one vanishes, I feel a sharp, bright grief, knowing they will not reappear. This is how a boat drifts out to sea from shore….

I see your clothes laid out on a bed: an elegant dress like a soft skin waiting for you to enter it and go to a funeral. Even from here I can see the fabric is soft, good quality. If you’ve left your dress on the bed your body must be close by… A larva…

Blood on the Moon —James Ellroy I thought the demolition derby or soap box derby or a roller derby, anyway, was where I would accompany my friend Pilar. I thought we’d be out the door when I mentioned “derby”, but not on this day. She just wanted to spend the hours at home; join the…

for Miroslav Nikolov In the year I graduated from West Daffodil Sr. High School there was so much romance in the hallways that, by the end, the powers that be—weary of it all— cancelled the prom. This forced us to explore each other’s undraped bodies exclusively in such automobiles and private homes as our district…

in all things, sonny boy, my father advised when I complained the mulberries that dyed my lips the protuberant shade of a girl’s had left me with a stomachache. He ascribed the quote to Socrates, his source for all words to the wise. But how did one acquire the wisdom to know which mulberry on…