Poetry

What have you done? Opened this box of sound, warped like sand beneath water, remember that? The waves of perception moving you away from me. We grow farther apart, but we are equal in our ignorance of how. No change there. Like celestial bodies distancing—like the animals in autumn. How? This knowledge, how will you…

After the protest at dusk, two policemen on horseback closing the park approached me and Vita and offered us rides home. Sheepish but game, we grabbed hold of their leather and galloped across field and hill to the edge. Gassed and smiling, we waved goodbye. Jim was waiting at the restaurant. I wanted to tell…

My mother was once held at knifepoint for a day. The man positioned the blade at the blue places of her pulse, as if tracing the ground for water, divining as it’s known. Or maybe I’m thinking of the pointed device that searches for sapphire, bright veins beneath the earth. Throughout my childhood, I imagined…

PUNISH THE SHOOTER, NOT THE GUN is a hard line to take seriously, as seen on the bumper of an old Dodge hearse spray-painted black and gold, passing on the right. If I honk, will he think friend or foe? A question best left rhetorical, so I keep my hands at ten and two and…

Suddenly everyone’s friendly, 2020. We’re working in the front yard, Boyd and I, and our neighbor who’s never spoken to us calls out, “Good job!” And now we’re talking. She’s seventy-seven. “Early spring,” she says, and then, “My grandkids can’t come up to visit, because.” We nod. We’re nodders. We wave. We’re wavers. For years,…

I carry the East with me, I carry it to the West. Wrap it in layers in a small suitcase tagged for the West, In America there is a romance that calls for leaving Known people & places to head for the West. I open a suitcase & stare at shoes that leaked sand; Oh,…

Billie, I told the Devil not to let you into Hell. It’s where you think you’re going soon, when at last that golden horse’s hooves run roughshod over your heart. No, you have your own heat, a heady steam off your scalp. Before you, I hated my smell, like his fingertips after stealing a girl…

Who was that girl in the maze, too busy being a needle to understand she was also an eye? All bothered heat. All light the underside of a storm cloud scraping the city with its silver. Some of her is left in me, slipped into the marrow, caged beneath ribs. Is she this blunt thumping?…

“It’s not a good disease to have,” my doctor says. I admire his grim honesty, I admire it greatly. “Indolent, but it usually does progress.” Which sounds about right for me. Two years of misdiagnosed torment and now this. I ask him about suicide. He nods. “It happens,” he says. When I tell him I’ve…