1. Three people walk on a cockle hill: broad-forehead Coleridge, yakking away emphatic whirling his arms; tall Wordsworth keeping his steady measure in long strides; serene Dorothy, taking it in, quiet, melding the men. A farm dog, half-grown, short-legged, snags their scent and runs to accost them, growls a moment, bares his teeth as if…
All winter two giant snowballs stood in the center of the trampled schoolyard, & another one off to the side I felt bad for, then felt foolish feeling bad for. Every day I observed them through the chain link fence. Three giant snowballs the strewn parts of a would-be snowperson’s body. I’m trying not to…
under the overpass of the Cross Bronx, the headlights flash on broken concrete—between cars and exit ramp—and some undefined hunk of metal rising out of broken glass; then the disconnected passage that got us to Manhattan comes to me like a collage of cities spilling off the map. All I know is my father left…
I am the lion. I am the keeper of the keys. Black hats float upon the waters. When I think, I’m sad; when I don’t, I’m elated, over-joyed. Dazzled by the silverblackbacked mirrorwings of three ravens, I follow the shadow dancers onto thin ice! Once I drank silence from a spring, Once I opened slowly…
I had a dream over and over as a child in my shimmering morning-light room, —it was set there, where I slept, woodpeckers hammering at the eaves, the river’s waves’ light moving as if forever on the far wall. I’d wake (still asleep) in the dream —I couldn’t speak!— as the two hands hovered. So…
They come jittering into her life from the past, brunette like her mother, wiry and tense, wearing garments black as anthracite chopped from the city’s heart. Complaint rises like music or smoke past the elegant lamps of their faces as they settle their fringe and nail polish onto our secondhand couch: men, mostly, but the…
Nothing was foreshortened but love, those days of the iced-over river and penniless Thursdays— Iowa, where the news finished with the latest on pork bellies. The paper was named the Press-Citizen, a contradiction in terms. We eyed the neighbors with their post-midnight record hop, Led Zeppelin blasting the arm’s-width of the alley. The injuries of…
Everybody seems to be pointing things at one another these days. The cop with the radar gun pointed his radar gun at my car and my car pointed back, its rearview mirror, to give the policeman an idea of what hurt looks like even if you do deserve that ticket, going 90 in a school…
When my grandmother pulled out the wool suit I hated and told me to take a bath, I wondered just how long it would take before she told me that my father was the thing under the blue tarp in the wagon the men brought up from the fields, but I watched her go to…
No products in the cart.