Poetry

By 1970, 33 states had bannedshoe-store x-ray machines. Mr. Levitz sits on a stoolmeasuring feet with a steelslide that feels cool when itnudges the tip of my toe.Future and past mean lessthan the ash on his cigarette,which will fall on the floor,because the plate in hishead makes him forgetwhat happened beforethe war. But these shoeswill…

Perhaps with a desk between, some chaste space, the recruiter leaning forward, warm bodies on the other side.   Of the teenagers present one will lie about her age, one will eat bananas to make weight,   one pull herself from small-town quicksand. Lace the hands behind the head, look good in a uniform, look…

The sky so whitethere is no sky.The water,a tarnished plate of silver. The dog sits dutifully.No, sits like a kingwho says nothing,who looks aroundunmoved, his golden robeshedding.

I think of the man in the V for Vendetta mask dangling his legs off the roof of a drugstore on Franklin Street. No one else seemed to see. My friends kept walking toward the restaurant, talking about tax breaks and single payers, and I told myself, advertising stunt, Halloween prankster, my imagination, and then…

Because the blinds stay open, I see birds. I watch men watch those birds. Men monitoring flight paths and a soaring hunger for the crumbs they shouldn’t’ve   pocketed from chow. The indifferent birds ask for nothing, yearn for nothing, except perhaps the sky, which is nothing to them but magnetic blue wind—their one great…

Who is nothing, now, but a few fistfuls of ash. Not even that, since ash dissolves and is taken into the bodies of plants, or swept into the air on the wind. He’s so very fine he slips undetected through a whale’s baleen, or a beetle’s gullet. He can even rise through a stalk of…

If you forget me, remember the Italian ice we shared in Venice, leaning over a parapet. I believe it was sour apple. Now, you pluck a single tulip from the pixelated blizzard, expecting from me, a Pavlovian response. In the absence of stimulus, my mind returns to a paradisiacal state, where I am continually piqued,…

I remember the lure of seed, the outstretched hand           begging me to nest beside him in bed during those first nights, the pecks, the treats, the ecstasy           of new love swelling inside my breast right before everything changed. Some nights, it’s just once, a soft blow           that stings for an instant, but doesn’t leave a…

It’s an art to suck the marrow from a bone, a woman who lived through poverty once said to me. My own debt-to-income ratio drives me to drink, in the afternoon, and at night. The neon strobe lights at our favorite club illuminate your face, before it shutters and closes off. In the end, happiness…