Poetry

  • Fathers and Sons

    During my father’s walk, he went underground to pin down rails, pushed his back against cement walls when trains slammed by. The day’s hammering done, he headed for the circle of gray light. His father first went down into the tunnels and in his dotage bragged of breaking the 1911 strike by staring the men…

  • Table Manners

    Table manners are so emotional: These knives reflect the teeth they imitate, Returning us to an uncultured state. The duke across from me is very tall, But not so tall as Dottie (my blind date).      Table manners are so emotional      These knives reflect the teeth they imitate. The seamstress next to me is very small…

  • Dialogue

         for ms The shadows move on the wall. Rabbits and plums fill the space and the space fills her. It is too easy, he said, you must become the space. Take it inside you, the bootblack sky at night, the bony ocean rising at morning until there is nothing else. I will open the door,…

  • Tristan

    The moon beat like an oyster at his head as he rode, his mare’s flanks hung with seaweed, with sea-green veins, flighting the quicksilver tide for Tintagel. An iron wind sang through his visor, thin grid of vision, of Isolde, of the steel mesh and winch of passion, of Mark with the calculating look of…

  • 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…