The air above this man-made
reservoir turns violent
pink each afternoon. This is a tune
on a guitar I can barely
play. I’ve built
a forest of grief and you
aren’t allowed in.
Fifteen miles from my childhood
home, water still waits
in Osage Pond. Carrots grow
in the garden my mother
abandoned, even beyond
the fence, but the penny-sized frogs
have disappeared. My mind
reaches into my father’s
coffin and finds just silence. I’m sure
that owl on …
Our house leaned and pitched in strong winds. The tin roof
a watering can for black snakes wintering in the attic;
the kitchen ceiling had one-tile-in-from-the-wall painted
for ten years, …
Sundays my father made us chorizo
we still begged to skip church
four bad kids in line for communion,
recanting silence
seeing the backs of our neighbors, the lint on …
Soon I’ll need assurances, a shower, coffee, pills.
In the fuzz of dawn, I’m a bell
and time’s the clapper, rung until
one state of being over-rings another—
so soon, so …
I wrote, day after day, about the bee
in the begonia – bees, I should say, though it was only
one at a time, amid the many blossoms.
I took …
Driving on black ice—
I braked too hard,
spun into a 360
and then two more.
Like a boom of a sailboat,
the back of the car
slammed a dog.
In …
Rubber band of sleep tight across my eyes I wake to ocean lights like stars, work of a boat, or farther, pin-lamp of ship. Tide, the gray-haired waves comb toward …
Sundays my father made us chorizo we still begged to skip church four bad kids in line for communion, recanting silence seeing the backs of our neighbors, the lint on …
The dead have the whole city to think with the fla-vor-ice tube the whole tongue cherry red. Trapped below the lake, the slow sharp breath, the mottle, the dogskin, the …
To be a traitor is to trade— Take, for example, the blue macaw of my childhood, traded for two rocks of crack and a dime of blow. My block raided
