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
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
I knew a bullnecked man in Kansas, born of woman, plowman, fellow man, he turned into a swan. The dust and yellow corn of Kansas in the sun, the same sun burned the windblown soul of him. The … Read More
“Window” was vind-auga, if I remember old Norse right—the “wind-eye” for smoke to spiral out and light to finger in at some hollowed cranny high by thatch, open slot to let the stave-house breathe by dim fjord or Iceland … Read More
Aotearoa, since the Oligocene Drowning Event, has been overrun by ground parrots, improbable weta, bats that scoot on their bellies, daughters in a state of ecological release, free from ancestral interdependence, able to establish new niches. Anyway, that’s my story. … Read More