The Philanthropist
They were supposed to meet in the café at 1pm. Petro arrived a little late and found the terrace empty. He chose a table in the shadow...
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Good Luck with All That
It’s safer, they say, to cross the border for a flight. We’re your boys, they say. We’ll take care of it.
Oh?
They take my money for...
In the Flying Dream
Rush of rim and black rock, soar
and cinematic pitch—it was
that vast: canyons, wheat fields, thunder clouds at night—bend of knees...
Giant II
O earth,
little landscaped
terrace of cold, coffered seed,
the restless sleep of ants,
heavy-jawed—
it is time to get serious...
Vaya Con Dios
When I was a young child
I rode around my parents’ apartment
on a pony stick wishing my mother
vaya con dios until she would ignore me...
Renovations and Repairs
The Garzas call Becca to tell her there’s a kid dancing on our front lawn. Through the blinds we watch Isaac sway in the streetlamp’s...
Wilmington, Delaware, in Eight Superlatives
Most Satisfying Childhood Activity Sometimes when I was a kid I would be going out of my mind with boredom. There were too many of us in...
The Daffodils
Either I wasn’t thinking, or I thought
I could cross under the prison window
on my way to the town library and not be
a wound to those...
Good Question
Well, that is a question, I must say,
answers Tom. Why? Because for any
of us, the best good act is noted. Forget
the old Biblical...
Money Shot
So the world will go on, and the International Brigade
will become less than a memory of something forgotten,
with some looking back at...
I Am an Abscess
I am dopesick and coked up in my apartment—four bedrooms and a loft I share with five other men. Normal men. Not men like me...
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My mother and father wanted to name me Cohen but my Zaidie said that they had to choose a different name. It will be his middle name...
The Bystander
Yesterday Ella left. She must have packed up sometime in the afternoon. I came back to a half empty house after a day at the office...
The Forger Paints before Her Jailors
For cops and art historians, I demonstrate. First the fleck technique. Then daub-then-dab. The more I lay it on, the lower falls the...
To Have Been Othello’s Second Wife
Remember, not one man in the room wished him undone
or misremembered the service he had done the state.
Even now viewers love...
Snow Slip Bar and Café
Behind double barbed wire fences
the bulk of the tribal bison herd
grazes on silence. The rest
gaze west toward the Rockies That...
The Unfinished Chapel
I live on a pinnacle of rock that overlooks the holy lake. Up here it is hard to breathe. It is always cold. The eagles cast themselves...
Nail
It’s the memory of falling off the wall that makes it so I can see things the way they really happened. It’s remembering the little bit...