Flash of fur — wolf burst out from the highway’s hidden, forbidden margins. We saw each other’s fierceness through the bright and dirty glass. Loneliness blooms from sweat. What flowers Might the outcast know, queer & ignored by the pack focused on their own warm throats? Wolf or coyote, I dreamt that he was mine though whimperings call house dogs… Read more →
I want to make a gun– Platinum, the stock scored With rosewood’s grain. The bullets will leave the barrel As aimless as the gypsy moths Eating July in green bites. My gun will kill every other gun, A cannibal. No more kidneys Pierced, urine alkali in spleen, Bile spilled, livers unmolested. Crows will be uninterested In the metal carcasses. Then… Read more →
A bigger boy, pimples like the ungentle world across his cheeks, pushes my 8-year-0ld as they get on the bus. I see it and I cannot pull my son back to our kitchen, where he stood just this morning in his socks, with the refrigerator open long, getting milk for his cereal. Or to… Read more →
I believe in the distance a wild snail travels, its miraculous and sticky yardage. I believe in the bison calf battling the wide and rowdy river, his mother banked on the otherside, patient with her demands, the wolves along the woodline, waiting, waiting. I believe in flashfloods and slot canyons, assorted birds—the ugly-as-sin type, gathered beside a pond in a… Read more →
There were mornings when my mother could invent a song pluck it, like a whole peach bobbing from a branch. She’d fold in an improvised melody until her voice was yoked and in unison, the quick flicks of her wrist circumventing the rim of a wide bowl. That sweet batter, the promise of a future us kids salivated over. We… Read more →
I want to know everything about the snow tonight, how it empties into rain and gives birth to my truancies. How it can panic and bloom into the disco ball of the yard light. How it has a slow appetite like a clogged drain. A dead leaf rattles down the street, the wind’s urgency driving it, a sort of piracy…. Read more →
After a mother at a friend’s birthday party lights her child’s candles at the exact minute he was born, and my adopted child asks me, “What time was I born?” There was the waxed and colorful dress she wore to meet you. Outside: the unrealized river, fantasy of jungle, whole economy of rain. There was notable heat, of course, humid… Read more →
Nearby a river almost ended and the ocean wasn’t far —J. Portuondo Saying out loud that pretty, polysyllabic noun, Tallahassee, a world I slept through once comes ringing back to life. The carking song of a mockingbird comes rolling boulders over old doubts and dreams, through a damp and swampy inscape. Not once but twice I blamed that town for… Read more →
and watched a dozen men drive the first fairway, never far but always straight, always simple. Around their slow and level swings, heat bloomed through leaning palm fronds. Inside—behind the big wide glass was something I never thought I’d be: content in the cave of someone else’s dream—alone with three whiskeys down, deep in the AC’s hum, imagining a caddy… Read more →
