Poetry

Wind and Soup

For six days I’ve been re-heating soup. The bird in the soup never flew, never complained unless you would call the red flesh of his head a complaint. I ask my son where we come from. He says the wind. When he couldn’t fly he told me little people helped him pour darkness into holes….

No Dead Ends

     Don’t ever hold on to anything!      Let it go! Let it go!      And you’ve got it.            -Claire “Don’t lay your trip on me, ladies. I don’t care if you’ve got a headache, a muscle hurts, your old man has split with another chick, or what your dreams are. . . Drop your shoulder! Stop…

Slowing Down

The pleasure in being tired after sex is the feeling of that slow infection someplace else. The explosion passes like the name of a town you leave your body outside of. Emptiness returns to normal under you. Then you burn imaginary rubber, extracting the acrid smell of Indianapolis, the collision of smiles and steel. You…

Backtrack

— JB, H & Mr. B This is the death of water, the sky gone bad; This is the wall of blurred names; This is the drop of wax, the shined shoe; This is the noise, the wardrobe of no address — And this is the shirt, bone shirt, chalk and chalk dust, Its coat,…

The Tablecloth Explanation

It’s all because the round man with the pumpkin neck was teaching no one in particular macadam composition, and because a lady giggled like dry fire when the bartender who liked lighting his lighter and looking at it said a fellow wanted to be a vampire to get the inside story but he had bad…

Sex

The Holston lolls like a tongue here, its banks Gummy and ill at ease; across the state line, Moccasin Gap declines in a leafy sneer. Darkness, the old voyeur, moistens his chapped lips. Unnoticed by you, of course, your mind Elsewhere and groping: the stuck clasp, her knees, The circle around the moon, O anything….