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My grandfather rode with the Czar’s army. He was abducted from a village in Austria, trained to pillage and drink, plunder and rape, and ride the best horses that could be had. They were given the best vodka and the sharpest swords. They were all just boy
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They could occupy the space//
left by creatures larger and more/
evolved.
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In my life when I am pursued /
by some wildly delicate thing
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My accordion's name is Sophia and she is from Italy. She was born in fairytale fashion, the way my life in Madrid can sometimes be. A great and nurturing friend gathered money from many friends in our village, to buy me an accordion for my birthday. It was…
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Satchmo sings a love song over the sound system. People read books, tap keyboards, drink coffee, eat cake. In Barnes & Noble—more a coffee shop these days than a bookstore—I am thinking about my dad and his stomach cancer.The terror he…
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Maddy knew how to make a sauce. It embraced the meat in a thick, buttery ooze.
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Some people are born that way, and some people do things to themselves
that keep them from talking. Like opening up a soda bottle with your mouth.
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150153
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Maybe God couldn’t find His bifocals, and that’s why my check for ten million hasn’t shown up yet. Maybe a stray dog in heaven ate my check. Maybe God went bankrupt like everyone else. Okay, so maybe at the end of life I’ll balance my checkbook.
I do
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Fortunately, when the bird hits the sliding glass doors in our den, I know what to do.
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From the way she scooped him from his buggy, shushed him, kissed his tears and hugged him...
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my time there was not one afternoon not / one river not one tunnel not one falling
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1I looked through the window of the drive-thru into the customers vehicle. There, encased in a ton of metal and plastic, sat a balding, rotund man in his mid-forties with flesh that resembled cookie dough sprinkled with beads of sweat. Not only did he defy physics by…
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The reality of the now
makes tomorrow
very distant.
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You slit your eyes and flick your cigarette in front of an oncoming car. I see how easily you could be that oncoming car.
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What's missing from their bodies is nothing compared to what's missing in their heads. One man in particular, now almost 80. Wakes to the smell of napalm, cigarette smoke, gasoline. Is he still feverish? Will the fungus rot his foot? But he remembers he
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“I take him to see all those sexy movies,” she said, “because it puts the passion back in him. I love what he does to me when we get back home after those movies.”
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I did not understand its meaning until college when I learned that Frost would take long walks—the inspiration for so many of his poems—and would leave his wife at home while he did. And just before he left, she would guilt-trip him just a little by walk
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The last thing I remember is falling below the water, lungs filling with liquid.
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men sitting on stoops
women earning the rent
by working as servants
in the rich folks yard
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After my father moved in with his girlfriend, my mother sold the split-level and rented a two-bedroom in an apartment complex rife with divorced mothers and the under-employed.
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Saturday at Portobello market. Wind whittles leaves from the trees; casts shop signs into windows, turning glass to shimmering fishscale.
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106434
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Estonia wore a liver milagro charm on a thin piece of rawhide around her neck and slept with her teeth in a jar. She was dreaming as she often did of the four children she conceived in Mexico. They had been born in bright colors and dust. Her first child Nina…
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Two women sat at a small round table near the sidewalk waiting for the same man.
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I tell my students about a timewhen seniority was told by the number of fingers on a worker's hands No weekends or overtime, children — bare toes dangling — twelve hours on the line I look for…
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A speech that could not have been anything but earnestly prepared, sweated out under a hot light bulb while june bugs thumped against screens, delivered to fellow graduates, relatives, a state senator, the high school principle, and faculty representatives, all seated …
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It has been more than three decades since I returned to work from a noon union meeting to find myself, along with about twenty others, locked out of the printing plant where we worked.
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This is not a story you expect to end at Cape Horn.
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“Why, you tell a story,” one young fellow said. The expression on his face said “How gauche, how passé!”
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Even among the thousands of black cats/
in the world, though, he would nonetheless/
be my favorite with those impurities of light brown tufts
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