More on: Poetry

They wished they could take their friends with them when they moved. It wasn’t far, trading one small town for another, not even a hundred miles across the state line. A point of pride to keep in touch, long distance calls on Sundays after supper, person-to-person for Carleen to catch them up on the local…

1. A patch of nothing the size of a nickel above the nape, smooth moon, the beginning of myth, the spread of skin and each morning’s sheddings at the feet, each little swirl, a parable, unblessed.  2. Forced to lose the one crow-shined feature I’d been allowed, each week another round found, spots, pale and…

There was a man who filmed a wild bird perched lightly on his knee, an eastern phoebe, and how I wish it had been me to receive a little sign the tide might turn, shift. Think my rod, my staff, the craft of conjuring a little belief, a field of grass, a clear horizon line.…

As if we would remember only this—the perfect dust— How we slaked it, how it cost next to nothing, twenty-five Cents American, those sweating green twenty-five-milliliter bottles, Quaffing that nutty flavor, our privileged deprivation, Loving it more, that entire year, because there was In a city of ten million no other lager. This is what…

Sometimes the mind rises only into its own sky The day gone to wind and last night’s rain Our names skipping like flat rocks Across someone else’s hopscotch Where once you scratched your Xs and Os. Or was that tic-tac-toe, tally where no one Should ever win, though you can blunder Badly, losing in the…

Nothing quite rhymes like time to kill and this long, clingstone schooling— reason traitorous, the season a bomb of decoy mimosa, birdscree, the pool under shattering low leaves, God saying now. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready. Will I go easy, nail from a rotted board, splinter pulled from a foot surprised & bare…

What’s death? Horizon kept moving by time & denial? Hank of water hung in air where love once stood, naked among stones? His hand there. By which I mean here? Ink-steeped wolf, boar, fox bristles lineate feet, mons, breast, heart in conjuring vista: the fist itching opens. A graveyard, too, a cosmos of parts; platitude…

No one knows anymore. Or any less, for who can ever be sure about once. Or upon a time, as if time were a chair. For there was a time when time was more or less sparrow. Sparrow yes and sparrow no. Sparrow the answer answering all the questions. So. The people would put the…

can be disconcerting take it from one who’s been there hobbling on rubber legs through fifty shades of graves to end up riding down a metal tunnel that kept screeching ha! haha! ha! your body strapped to a gurney where (ha ha!) if you blinked the whole insane scenario would have to be replayed and…

You feet! I resign myself to you—I know what you —–mean, I behold in my hands your soft heel, your crooked toes I shape like couplets a cow’s hide, I make it understand —–the length of your walk, the refrain of your adventures, —–the places you will see I put bows on the pink shoes…