Poetry

Who rhymes Knives with sight? Watches horror late at night? Across the way He phones and orders wine. As diners dine The knife cuts back To a skirt. A hand there never hurt. The bark hello: Is it me who first goes blank? Cannot greet or thank Him at my ear? Silent goes the phone….

Red tinsel wrapped around a roadside cross glints in the sun like a cop’s strobe bar, then recedes into the drive’s unbroken trance. Power lines X-Acto-knife the sky. Pasted and scraped, a billboard’s pastel palimpsest, photographed in raking light. Our eyes locked on the road, stories unpeel in the rental car’s souped-up and streamlined confession…

for Kwame Dawes The youngest won’t fall asleepthough he keeps resting his head on the tablenext to his empty plate.These are the jewels of hishalf-open eyes bewitched by the paleblossoming spines of the centerpiece flowersno one remembers the names of—these are the sparks flying upfrom the fire and the darkpressing in on the windows. I…

Of the stiff-backed prime minister the people saidThat he had swallowed his umbrella. They trusted himNot with their lives, their daughters, or their pension plans,But with something intangible: his bloodshot eyesGlimpsed in their collective souls a yearning to undoThe code by which they lived—the code he would rewriteIn a war launched on an imaginary foe….

               I answer the phone. After the usual delay, no telemarketing hum but a male-voiced “Gotcha, gotcha a little bit.” His tone is practiced. It boasts he’s finalized everything that needed saying. Here in me to be jeered at is the thing we’ve all got coming that may not…

Skinny printed boards half ad, half measurement, they came home with dad from businesses he visited, their names and numbers and Lowest Prices! slogans branded into cheap wood like on giveaway pencils. Lightweight, I’d wield one as a bat, a sword, a club: if it splintered, no problem, there were plenty of trees and we…

Somewhere on I-5, in the flash of hazard lights, I was broken-down. But it seemed enough to have light. The piano playing itself in the hall needs tuning, its notes ghostly and bent in the half-light. Tennis shoes and tin cans tied to the car the couple rushed out toward, struck by rice and the…

Skin of a plum. Rotting tooth. Switches cut down by a child to lash a child’s legs. A siege does something like this against sturdy walls. The wrong rules. A dozen angel figurines flying from a balcony. Flailing fist. Splint. Forefinger and index, dislocated, not broken. One points to the left of a man and…

Your sister’s inside in a green gown and you, here, twisting your dread into origami tissues, riot mind ticking wrong wrong, you’ve crashed your mooring, fear every wart, organ, every minor— what’s this pain in my groin? Is this what’s been waiting all along? All of us carried off on a train, pressed to a…