When the neighbor kidshows up on the porch, clutching a flannelpillow, dressed in sweatpants and a t-shirt, shakes his dreads, stutters, “Hi, Mom, is John here?” You set down the...
Do you remember roller-skating in the basement on snow days?We stumbled and soared, our feet heavy and strange, as snowflakestumbled down so fast outside the tiny window, like the Michigan...
for Lauren B. /Lawrin B. At dusk, when regal moths kill themselves ignoblyon the bare yellow bulb of your porchlight, I name futures like racehorses. Alphabet Soupis the future in...
We worked until dawn back then—Afros and longhairs on the loading dock,mocking the small paychecks that cameeach Friday at shift’s end, the last truck now hollowed out, the bass metal...
The boy sits in a field.He is four or maybe three.Red-shirted, blue-shorted, he arranges his gathered trifles, loose sticks, wasp’s wing, snail’s shell,sifts fragments too minor to signify.The weedy grass around...
in early July, just before harvest, mud on the frilly white hemof my sundress. Barefoot. We squeeze the last drops of beer from the keg — my little brother barely...
Another August morning the sky opensits smoke-heavy wings, and after so many years of silence, we hello each other in the cafe,as if not knowing the wooded placewhere we parked...
This is the tie worn by JFK the day he was killed (I show you a tie). Jackie had it washed and placed in a museum – a symbol of the...
Mouth open, I runmy mother’s last lipstickover my lips. I’d forfeitall my wordsfor a snippet of her voice.Her absence keeps swinging into my framelike a door with a broken latch,the mysterious spotin...
Our inclination is to assume witnessfor the grand & inevitable. Many, for example, believe the worldwill end in their lifetimes.Imagine—languor of booted feet suspendedout the passenger window, laces dithering in the...
That was the day I began to paint the rabbitwith a flat straw hat, a smaller rabbit on top of that, another hat, a caption that says, “When My Feelings Have Feelings.”...