Poetry |
“That Winter,” “Unshed Tears and the Snow” and “Do You Dare?”
“That winter when the night sky was violet, I was sure I would remember it, / and the sight of unbroken snow in the morning, I would remember that too …”
Poetry |
“Little Speech” & “Spring Summer Fall Winter”
“Undesirable you may have become, wept over / by no one, your green age passed by. / Don’t you remember the first chill / in the fires wasting August, / our last great season?”
Poetry |
“Martial Arts” & “Coming Back”
“At the start of every lesson the teacher / asks, What’s your best defense // in a dark alley? Upstairs our son swings / his legs, kicking neatly like a clock // at the quarter hour …”
Poetry |
“Dad and the Eye Exam” & “Milk Run”
“My chin rests in this little sling / and I let you come back from the dead. // Go ahead, sit by the magazine rack / as the optometrist taps our history // into the record …”
Poetry |
“I Do Not Always Feel Sad When I Think About Humankind’s Eventual Mass Extinction”
“Today in the park, roses / dormant, the foliage all / undressed for the wretched / months to come, my daughter / waving from her stroller / at squirrels, I heard the hawks / circling …”
Poetry |
“Growing Up in the Mouth of the Wolf”
“Firearms enforce the wolf’s freedom. A boy/must learn to be/a wolf. //The wolf swallowed me. The men/of my childhood hated. They ate/with their eyes.”
Poetry |
“Dream Song” & “Born Again”
“From our team leader with secrets / I felt the graze of her gaze on my legs, / I grew lean, played guitar and drew portraits, / inhaled the scent of roses …”
Poetry |
“King Street”
“The noise / from the Greek / restaurant downstairs // subsides, leans / into the shoulder / for the walk home, // a little quiet, / a little drunk …”
Poetry |
“Year of the Snake”
“My long-ago Braille teacher / suspected me of peeking at the little / bumps on the page. I was flattered / And also insulted.”
Poetry |
“The Zone of Instability,” “Bevy of Beauties Blacking Out” & “This Wee Lock”
“The photo displays some of the 73 members of SHARE (Share Happily and Reap Endlessly), an organization of movieland housewives who put on a minstrel show to build a diagnostic clinic for retarded children …”
Poetry |
“Imagine That”
“I learned about Mr. Harrigan, tracked his slaveholding. / We found Mr. Colrain when my wife’s mother sent old papers / no one read at any more. By chance we discovered / their joint tenure in the South Carolina legislature.”
Poetry |
“The Generations”
“When my father spoke to my aunt from Guaynabo, / I cried when he said to me, his face pale and drawn, / ‘Your cousin tried wading through an undertow.'”
Poetry |
“Shorn,” “Visitation” & “All movement mimics other movement”
“I say, for a bloom born of / a time of temperance, your ticking is lush. / which is to say, I miss afternoons detonating / in the growing sound of insects.”
Poetry |
“This Summer the Girls” & “Relics of the Mountain West”
“This summer the girls are all wearing blue / fingernail polish, looking as if they’ve drowned / or suffocated, or been poisoned by carbon / monoxide. As if they’re trying on for size / death …”
Poetry |
“A Framed Photograph”
“The day after my father died, / his boss, Charlie, came to our house / carrying a box. // Early evening, / my mother and I welcomed him / into the foyer.”