Poetry

My dresses huddle in their closet.No histrionics, no tears. They’re undaunted,unhaunted, since you disappeared.Torture by laundry and mothballis all I can offer them, though it’s Christmas.And despite the holiday, there’s endlesswrestling on tv. Is that your nudge to me:toughen up and roll with the punches?Here on earth, another rough era is birthed.Sea monsters burst from…

He held my hand on the ride from El Centropast the sugar beet plant     its smell of dying frogs like the ones we’d dissected in biology lab     the formaldehyde on my fingers for days     the way lettuce smelled like slicing     or tomatoes     little hearts     They formed a white mountain     the sugar hulls     sweet climbing hillgated     & locked beside alfalfa fields      The desert sky roiled…

The Houston nightclub, long shut down, whereI once spent Friday nights. Someone shoots up Heaven,both bars and the smalldance floor in the back.But the patrons, all justmy memories now,ethereal, wisps of smokeand soul, don’t noticeor care. The bulletsspray through themwhere they cluster atthe second bar, blurringtheir bodies as they flirtand throw back cocktailsthat turn to…

Fooling around, witnesses said, the man pushing his friend off the dock with his foot when he couldn’t wake him up. Svedka bottle back and forthall afternoon, the one passed out, the other working him, cajoling, needling,wheedling, that if he didn’t wake up, wake up right now, he was going to push him in, thinking in his own…

I The woman who had the job before I had the job was supposed to train me for a month. That was the plan. I would start in July and she would leave in August and we would, like waves, or words, or worries, overlap. But my contract was caught up in an air conditioned…

Suboxone—illusory, nomadic,practical; the lighter with a sunseton the ledge, the roominess of midnightsin small towns nodding out. All this I like.The cigarette stubbed out on the rearviewmirror—this too I like. The little things:Cars lined up at seven a.m. beforethe gate to see the meteor craterhas opened. Ruins of a Shell station.The stand set up along…

A homeless woman at the reference desk asked, “Am I an angel, or merely a supernatural creature?” She was agitated, all the muscles of her narrow face in nervous motion, and I was too startled to answer. A man I worked with, who often ignored patrons for his own reading, rose and stepped forward to stand…

The dogs in the neighborhood are barking.At the end of his lead our young dogstalls in darkness between yards and digs inhis two-year weight. He has a scent—God is in the garden.I crouch and point my light. Characters run across yards with pumpkin bucketsand faces in masks or marked with paint.This is what trembling feels…

which is a biographical fact only ever statedwhen discussing a man of either unrivaledrighteousness or extreme wickedness. Imagine this: He never once used a bellin his saliva experiments, unless you countthe plink of kibble falling from his dogs’ surgically opened throats, and why wouldyou want to count that? I admit I often tellyou about the…