They loved the heart-shaped leaves we poured, which bledwhen they first sipped, then blew on, a steaming latte;who parted our morning crowd and, at its head,frowned as if to hide their A-list beauty.They walked in after late nights on the setand, caps pulled low, accepted the double takeswhose tiny grapplings twisted into a net,which then …
after Hughie Lee-Smith: Desert Forms (1957) Besides you, Zeke, and the Queen, hardly anyothers find the eleventh letter as faithfulto our cherished ease. Your laugh in my hands.What it must be to travel the distance of onememory, never get lost. The meteorologist on channelnine offers this weekend as the time to expectpartial coverage of clouds …
after Gordon Parks: Untitled, Chicago, Illinois,from the series Metropolitan Baptist Church (1953) Losing form beforethe everlasting a favorof your kind owed notto the beginningsexempt from the ethicof joy or those whocould not show youthe luxuries of paindifference betweeneach dig at deeptissue solvedby the therapist whosewrist leads eitherthe moan or musclejudgeless before harmI keep on running …
Stretched out across the white-on-bluemy friend Nathanial Birdsongis dying under the same sky as the egretswho mispronounce his name, dyingin the same hospital that admittedmy parents after the deer crash.When we were kids, the forest skywas filled with loopholes anda deer leapt out of the night,hind smashed against the Broncowindshield. I could not stop crying,Nathanial …
Woe-Bear-I-was-left-alone-with—oversized head custom-made to fitsuch enormous sadness—puts his head on my lap,his body stoked with cotton wool and folk song,left ear mangled from that time he was suspendedabove the waste disposal. His screams closed-captionedso parents can’t read them. Later claimed the let gowas accidental.From one side to the next we pass bridgeswe know, until we …
Bang-bang in the park pond, ducks concussedand my daughter’s scream unfurls. Teenagers lobbingM-80s into the water for fun. I snap a perpetratorwith my phone, and my kid picks up the house keythat drops from my pocket. Like a mini-Caesar feedingon grapes, she tilts back her head, holds the key aloft.Don’t you dare put that in …
We could road trip to Tennessee from New Mexicothe kids & I we could be brave they think I’m bravewe could unroll our bags & throw our chanclas in the grasswe could barefoot it we could unlearn the constellations& learn them again unhitch their stories from their nameslike the names I’ve taken into my belly …
Listen to Matt Del Busto read the poem: after Robert Wood Lynn Not long after dinner’s beginning at the duplex we’ll live in for four moreweeks on West Middle, where it is mealtime pretty much all the time, our Estate ETQ4400XQ washer, a machine whose only jobis to do the dirty work of cleaning that …
I would like to withdraw my complaint with its quiet rattling of a car’sengine as it shakes down Market Street. Like the window fan that stopsclanking one August night, when it’s not heat that sweats us awakebut a bottle of Nero and the body’s ceaseless churning. Nothing iswrong. Or, the universe is edgeless but finite. …
In the winter a woman brings the oceanin a crate, goes about separating the seacucumbers from the starfish from the hermitcrabs and anemones into saltwater binslining the room like a secret magicshow in a museum, the curatora mermaid who grew legs in the tide poolat a place called San Diego, thirtymiles south and too far …