Poetry

* For once she gets to go with big Cousin Beatie, who is starting her breasts. They’re at Uncle Charlie’s      farm. Grandma says, “Ach, Kind, what will they think of next, enahow, the town school? Hunt the butterflies, yet!” But Beatie says, “It’s an Assignment.” Mother says, “Now go, first.” But she hates the outhouse,…

The afternoon air is so still and heavy with heat everyone in the house has gone off to nap. I let the tap water run a while over my finger tips waiting for the cold stuff to come from the spring. Bulkhead clouds appear in the kitchen window, comically      grand. Time settles over the edges…

When I was a boy we always did it this way. I wake to the smell of coffee and you are at the fire, its flames mirrored in your glasses. Buck, the Colonel’s dog, sleeps on beneath the bunk house his old legs quivering with problems of their own. The raw south Texas dawn is…

It has rained this afternoon and the landscape is a darker green. Wind rushes up and down the hillside until the field shudders like something alive. I linger at the screen door accepting these gifts watching the evening draw away into one corner of the sky. None of this will ever be quite enough. As…

The setting out was easy, your hands lifted in air to the relatives turned like trees to the river, the water flocking from the prow. Even when summer came back and doors opened for evening no word came. A search party covered the heavy water, waiting for it to open and hold you before their…

     for Heather Remember gathering eggs in the morning feeding the shells to the hens at noon? I had forgotten how we gave them back to themselves. The turtle"s nest, how we walked around her ring of stones? The Lincoln Fair? How lost I was when you were, how I looked for you already…

I bang my spoon on the table, my iron tongue. To calm myself I try to remember the weight of a cubic foot of water, count the layers of whitewash scaling the walls. Outside is a mild apricot evening, evangelist air. Everything is far away and there are no stairs. Send me a package of…

I walk on hooked rugs; my beds are covered with patchwork. Across the road they sell corn and red beans—fresh picked, and the milk in bottles has a layer of cream an inch thick at the top. This was my father’s home I have come back to. My elderly cousin is working her latest jig-saw…

She could only remember that leather thing of skin flapped over the sunken chest, the way the sheet cut him off at the waist and chin, effacing the place where the rest of the delinquent body hid. She could only remember the fact of ribs sprawled flat as the arms of starfish floating drugged on…