Poetry

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,…

He asks what I want him to do to me, the next move capable of unraveling our bodies precariously stacked. I tell him the truth: I don’t know. I do not tell him how I still can’t feel my body when in another man’s arms. I travel—backward, forward—the horizon is concealed by the still-brown trees…

Letter openers, proving we miss people urgently. Bottlecaps popping with satisfactory sound. All the miraculous ways to experience time— a roller coaster, a deep breath in sideways snow, flicker of windowsill basil glimpsed from an El stop at dusk. City streets patterned like plaid in a dishrag filling with sun. Portable stoves. Recycled stationary. The…

The featured pop star’s voice was too big for the waterfront  pavilion. That’s what the reviewer said. Her recent poignant hit  flew overhead, drifted right out the open sides  of the white tent, somehow tugging us with it, flinging us toward stars where we hung briefly before landing among jellyfish and buoys.  Once we were…

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…

“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…

Lunch recess, a football tossed in the air, John paced the length of the fence as a small group of girls gathered to gossip about Duane and who he liked while John, wanting so much to connect, ran at them screaming “John germs,” touching Cindy’s back. When the football soared too high, John jumped up on a stone…