after Wallace Stevens 1. “They’re the angels’ sofa cushions,” her daughter says. “When they bounce on them, their mummies shout.” 2. She listens to what the lady in the chair beside hers is saying as the stylist makes her hair bigger, bigger, bigger. 3. The clouds move as quickly as her mother’s memories, drifting out … Continue reading Ten Ways of Looking at Clouds
To what extent this will shorten my life is a question I will not ask. I do not want an answer. People get older. People forget. People die. The calendar dictates, you could say, all things. The waterfall that we visited in the morning when you were nineteen was not Niagara. We sat down beside … Continue reading At the Waterfall
When we were finished, we stepped back and leaned against the black- dusted SUV in the driveway. Grains of wet dirt slicked our arms up to our elbows, sweat freckled our reddening skin, and the nebula imprint of the sidewalk dotted the skin of my knees. I asked her what she thought as we stood … Continue reading This Way
Among the pile of tires where we would hunt for snakes you showed me your new bruises. When I told you one of them looked like a buffalo on a bike, you flipped me off and climbed up the bank. It was Thanksgiving, and we were spending it like used dogs beneath the bridge that … Continue reading Cry Baby Bridge
All your life you waited for some tiny bird – a wren, a cardinal - somewhere in the world whose birth would change your fortune. But now that chirping creature of joy is dead, buried in the earth with its lovesongs & there’s nothing left nothing for you to wish for nothing nothing but a … Continue reading Done and Undone
MY SISTER AND HER KIDS overtake the house, absorbing my six-year-old Kate into their stampede, exhorting her to find her shoes, hurry. They hustle her toward the door in a comical cacophony, as if to pile into a clown car. “’Bye, Mom!” Kate pauses for just a moment. “You’ll be here when I get back, … Continue reading July
It was the summer you burnt two acres of a corn field and almost the rest of town. You, the neighbor kid, and the pastor’s son shot off all the good fireworks we bought on the way back from the beach. You thought 2:30 pm in late July would be the best time to watch … Continue reading Daytime Fireworks
They said I need to change the launch angle and split open the soil between the mound and the plate. That that could be a first step to eliminating lockjaw and cleaning up the wax out in the briar patch. Forget the moral, they announced, There are no contrails left for that And besides, the … Continue reading Barrels
HE TAKES LONG DRAGS off his cigarette while driving his pickup truck down the rain-wet road, slick and dark as a whale’s back. The yellow, sodium-vapor glow of streetlights filter through the late-night drizzle and glint off the scar on his forearm—old, yet babyflesh smooth, sharing canvas space with the tattoo of a stained glass … Continue reading Mirrors
Sparkling new blue sneakers, the smell of typewriter ribbon, rainbow sherbet sunset, cold bicycle metal. Dawn & dew & paperboy ink stains. Cafeteria vending machine, cotton socks, green coach shorts, mop buckets, a radio, the Bee Gees then Frank Sinatra, lunch breaks & the bar after work. Broken dishwasher, a little orange light blinking E:020. … Continue reading While Falling From The Barn Roof