Poetry

Manhunt

My two great-uncles got sent to the state pen at Walla Walla and broke out. Lyle can write, Rex is an addict. They both know how shouts come from the part that’s not ready. They’re laying low in some woods in Oregon, some cabin whose floor must be climbing the walls. In Bremerton, Washington, where…

Nursing Home

My mother babbles. A salad of noises: “You know who this is?” asks my aunt and I dread some horror of an answer, but no, nothing. She rubs her tray instead. “It’s clean,” says my aunt, “the tray is clean. Evelyn, what are you cleaning? Play with your cards, play pishy-posh,” and then she laughts,…

He Live With Bears

Ol’Sam he go by the code of the hills, he paddle his raft into Teaberry Mills an gun down all the squares. “Take that, you rats!” he spit through his teeth, he toss’em a dead skunk for a wreath an fiddle away his cares. The woods she perk up all her ears, O m’darlin dance…

Found Poems

     Thomas Gray, 27 March 1767      Fine, but cold. Wd. Brisk at N.E. Saw the      Maloc Proscargh: abroad: it was the male.      Pilewort in bloom: & Red Currant on a North wall.      Gnats stinging.      Mrs. Mason Died.

Inflamation

Bang! 1917 & a Victorian Milan. That bang was the Garcia Crespo works gone up from munitions, 400 women, their long hair gone, have gone up with 150,000 rounds. Vickers guns emplanted on the line stayed quiet for two days near Trieste. A company of Yugoslavs convinced themselves that peace had come, threw down their…

Photographic Life

No matter what’s the photograph, you’re the man in the center always making sense. Look through the family album, grandma’s first beau, the nice guy who, vaguely, disappeared. Dad in the leather flier’s jacket, a plane called ANZIO BELLE. In the background’s the waist gunner they chipped out of a pile of shells & frozen…