Author Archives: Salamander

  We weren’t anywhere we weren’t nearby When she gave a shriek My friend had taken a bullet And was now walking the bullet around in his back   He’d reached the Scala Cinema And had gone as far with … Read More

  He will be a beggar–– no, a barber!   And he will polish your nails each time you lay down your pen   even though hair is his only métier.   And he will practice the close measure of … Read More

  I love these new super bookstores! Right here on upper Broadway— a standing invitation to a private stately home stocked with milling lounging browsing guests sipping demitasse or eating, perhaps, an enormous, soggy sandwich (I’m starving).   It’s like … Read More

  I fell for your strange lace of unstressed x’s, the beautiful a bb a cc patterns, mysterious codes I didn’t grasp but simply liked the look of. The primitive language of rhythm: bada bada  da bum dada.   I … Read More

  Bless the amber porch light that coronets his flimsy helmet’s sheen and the ringlets this dusk breeze bounces on elastic straps thin as earthworms baked black atop the stoop. Bless the dragging cape I forgot to hem that brooms … Read More

  I wait for you there, pushing the baby in his stroller. The baby claps with concentration and delight. A tiny, black-haired woman’s cheek bleeds as I walk from Emergency to Intensive Care and back again. We are helpless when … Read More

  Feeling like the neighborhood cat who fell through the screen of my open skylight, curiosity in this case leading, not to death, but limbo—stuck in an empty house until I returned from DC days later to find a thick … Read More

  starts skygreen as a glow in the chest cracks like a tree branch, her lips a deluge of lost notes, plastic fossils a lone mop tumbling down the street collides with a road bike, a pickup curbed strains the … Read More

  Yeah, you are obsessed: with your yellowish skin, you are forever lost in your meditation within the shape of a wishbone, inside the broken wing of an oriental bird strayed, or in a larger sense, you look like the … Read More

  But I am not here to fall asleep, to keep sleeping—I open the window, take issue with the black slag, the burning, blazing city I rummage through to find the makings for stew I am cooking, till it snuffs … Read More

  Too busy to wave back, barely a glance before your precious bridge, last span of concrete standing between you and one week’s vacation. Bags of boiled peanuts and sodas to go. Your landmarks are my neighbors: the farm market … Read More