To Begin With
By Poetry Issue 87
I am going to lie down in the field, grass a green halo over my head. I’ll let the sun singe the peach, my flesh, luxurious, ruined. Let rain have its way with me so I can feel my mother’s washcloth on my face, hand I turned from. Lord, soften the hard pit of my…
Read MoreWaiting with Cynthia
By Poetry Issue 87
While my brother and I waited for our father to die, which took longer than we thought it would, one of the hospital’s chaplains came in to visit us. Her name was Cynthia, and the first thing she did was read some passages from The Book of Common Prayer as we stood around our father—…
Read MoreSharing a Painting
By Poetry Issue 87
Piero della Francesca’s Madonna and Child with Two Angels For half an hour we had the painting mostly to ourselves, and the longer we stood there taking it in together, the more the people drifting around us seemed to disappear. We spoke quietly when we spoke at all, as though trying not to discomfort the…
Read MoreAgainst the Light
By Poetry Issue 87
The purple plant of abstinence grows in the murky shade gnaws at the caterpillar with its thorny teeth and snarls at its mealy flesh noli me tangere as if to crawl along its spiny hands the index finger stained with negatives were death, the sour wash of corpses circling down the winding drain that rusty…
Read MoreBone Anthem
By Poetry Issue 87
The how, the where are clear enough: you left one place, arrived another, but not whole, and groaning like a sax gone short on breath, the wail of way too late to ever roll the evening back to sober, slate to clean, forgive to forget, road unglazed with ice— too late to take it back…
Read MoreA Song on Geronimo’s Grave
By Poetry Issue 87
The sun, the darkness, the winds are listening…. —Geronimo, Chief of the Bedonkohe Apache Boys, I shit you not, it’s Oklahoma, Billy says, the Red River more red than river squatted under the border bridge like the raw ass-end of Mars, dry skin peeled under the flying rubber of Billy’s bald tires. As I drive…
Read MoreDaybreak, Winter
By Poetry Issue 87
Now light fills the tree outside our window— tree whose fruit, when it comes, only the birds, and just a few of them, want to eat, tree that turns stiff and dry midsummer, rushing the season, so we fear the city will come and butcher it, though so far it’s been spared because in spring…
Read MoreNear-Annunciation at Carroll’s Point
By Poetry Issue 87
First try, the bird dropped from the sky, belly-flopping the surface that separates our two worlds, and came up empty. He rose again and wung away in easy, languorous strokes, as if it was all part of the plan. Hunger returned him. But whose? What surprises us now, despite our dragnet…
Read MoreNew Year, Good Work
By Poetry Issue 87
The tools of the trade lay scattered on the floor below the altar, migrating to its surface (protected under plywood and a cloth tarp) only after the first few days, when the fine mist of wood dust that settled over the pews and furnishings helped us to feel more at ease in this space now…
Read MoreThe Ritz
By Poetry Issue 87
No you’re not a saint because you spare the maid a stubborn skid mark by swiping the bowl clean with an oven-mitt- sized toilet-paper wad during the one mid-flush moment between water’s vanishing and return before you step under the turbo multi-jet gleaming steaming solid-brass showerhead so brilliantly designed to make you feel exactly as…
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