poetry

  If it’s not the roof leaking, it’s the basement flooding, and if you’re lucky, if it’s raining hard enough, it’s both. Another mostly empty paint-can abandoned to the damp and the process of settling-out. Another circle of rust soon … Read More

  No one else could make it the same. Maybe the whipped milk cream was never fluffed to that cumulus, or maybe the ten pinches of sugar weren’t sifted to those sprinkles between thumb and fore-finger, or maybe the gelatin … Read More

  Kuya said to coffin Goldie in an empty cigarette pack, or say some words and flush him down the drain, but his sleek belly was a wink in the lonely morning light – I couldn’t. Ran to the backyard, … Read More

  Five girls vow to gather here around this fire every year. Five girls giggle in the firelight. The wind flicks a switch of smoke first to one face, then another. Each one winces as she can. Each face wrinkles … Read More

  Fee, Fi, Fo, They chirp the dirge into her bones. Cold peppers, pressed against the lettuce. Okra, bean stalk, she is at it again. Keeps pert with work. Packs a peck of 1985, a trowel. It glitters in cellars, … Read More

  A cowboy spits dip into used bottles, the hounds unfed for days, dishes yawning, uranium seeping, and you name buzzards, read the backs of soup cans, T.V. guides,– it’s how you forget the old life. You merge into pits, … Read More

  He remembers waking in the grey silence, stepping into patched trousers and cracked leather boots. The stables of memory still smell of sawdust and damp earth. The milk cows low hopefully. He is nineteen again. He pours the feed, … Read More

  We believe we can extend a hand to those who suffer. The air is suffused with heavy rain. Taking in the afternoon, shifting gears. We try to grasp what has befallen those whose loved ones fell. We read late … Read More

  See the ink below your knee. There your veins were mapped and quarried. The line your groin defines remains intact, smooth like timber, the timber of a ship, a Viking ship, long preserved before its harvesting. Notice now your … Read More

  ate the still-beating heart, folded when the gods came calling. son of a sewn thigh, son of a mortal. she bathed in the river, lost to lightning. lover crashed into her, gave her the seed of the world. Semele, … Read More

  You tell me this: the inlet was not carved from this spit of land by glaciations, frozen inching of big water. Not the insistences, waves, the riving wind-limned eye of a storm. But rather, the steady press of man, … Read More

  And then an old man and I looked through the scrap pile in the back, sifting through lonesome reams of brake pads and spools of cable housing, orphan top tubes, wheels,tires deflated and folded over themselves like cordgrass bent … Read More