We scooped up the baby,
ramrodded the four year old,
imprisoned the two gray tabbies,
locked them all in the ‘77
white LTD with the green vinyl interior
left to me by my mother upon her death.
Disrupting the murmuring stillness,
the nasally whine of a two-stroke motor,
hedge trimmers whipsawing
weeds framing sidewalk, infiltrating
Life came out of me
a gush of red
Moon-pale I waited those eternal
stretched seconds
for my
arms to be filled
with you.
Outskirts of a mining town in northern Minnesota
August 1990
A ten-year-old girl named Ursula Dahl chases after a porcupine behind her mother’s trailer, her frizzy red hair sparkling in the late-summer light. The animal escapes through a wild raspberry patch, but the child refuses to give up.
These arguments, the silences, were all a slow release
a practice run to make the death of us
this love we had, a little easier to finish.
We have come apart, the skin of us slide
to be faceless, naked, the bones of us stand free
Empty as the space
on the back of my neck
where the phantom of your
hand rests just
outside the confines of
my comfortable reach
To respect the privacy of the person I’m going to tell you about, I’ve given him the alias Dr. Theodore J. Ammon. If I tell his story well, after you’ve read it you will ask yourself whether you have known people whose lives have been affected in a similar way by the experiences of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.
David Harris stood at the front of a group of about fifty protesters gathered in a church parking lot just east of a strip of I-43 designated as Jeannetta Simpson-Robinson Memorial Highway just north of downtown Milwaukee. He was closely listening to the instructions being given by a young woman wearing a black T-shirt with I Can’t Breathe printed in large, white, block letters across the chest.
The night is a black dress
draped over the arms of a couch, she whispers
stars plucked like cherry blossoms.
A smokey hush fills the room
The hospital department chiefs hold monthly meetings in a conference room. The room has a high ceiling and tall windows. The walls are made of mahogany panels. There are large portraits of previous medical school deans on the wall. All of them are men in dark suits and black bow-ties, each holding either a pen or a book in their hands, looking straight ahead with an air of importance.
Nestled in the Adelaide Hills, Father John’s home is warm and inviting. Outside, the trees are dampened by the winter rains. The sky is dark although it is only midday. John sits in a blue armchair by the heater. Green plants surround us in the living room where we sit.
The pain, this feeling of inadequacy, is there with you, and although the seed of it was never recognized as a seed belonging to it, as a seed made of it—pain—they planted it still, in your making, ignorance at the center of their factice bliss, this justification—they didn’t know; did their best.
“We have no Rick Smith.”
“What do you mean? I was told they brought him here.”
“I’m sorry.” The [triage nurse’s] annoyance was unmistakable. I had no recourse but to wait.
I’d received a call about fifteen minutes ago. My husband was found by the maintenance man outside, face down on the ground.
Derry was my best friend, but that was a long time ago.
Since then, I built my career while Derry played in a band. I saved for retirement and Derry saw the world. And when I bought a house, Derry was still burning through a revolving door of roommates. Derry always used to say, “Sam… you’re the Yin to my Yang.”
Mariana Huaman had worked with the Flores family since Rosa was an infant and had been the one to witness the first miracle, the one that occurred on June 17, 1586. Now Mariana is approaching Rosa on her deathbed and remembers that distant day as if it had just happened.
My car twists and curves as the city lights disappear behind me and my headlights spool deep into the dark abyss toward my rural home. I feel relieved I don’t have to face Dad tonight. I’m waiting until morning to break the news of Mom’s death to him.
I swam in the Ganges, source of life to a billion bipeds, golden, striped in a horizontal blue crayoned by a dreamy child. My parents, like all teleosts, were indifferent about my birth, abandoning my siblings and me, but I grew in a chorion cradle, nourished by yolk, a pulsing sphere.
If you’re reading this, it’s only because it has passed through the net of editorial scrutiny. Presumably, an editor or editors have sharpened the argument, eliminated irrelevancies, tightened the prose, and reined in my more intemperate claims.
Eleanor Saravak studied the three news story drafts spread across her wooden desktop. Each one of them sported its own headline. Headlines that ought to boast so much bite and venom they may as well leap off the page and send folks six feet under.
Not that Eleanor joined the news biz to do her readers in or feed them dreck made of letters put together.
Laurenda did not like the look of those men, not at all. She had been hanging the washing up on the clothesline behind the cabin when she heard the tortured whinnying of horses driven too hard, and the whoops of men careless about their steeds. She dropped the children’s clothes in a heap upon the grass and hastened into the cabin.
You inhabit me; you narrow to flanks.
Your spineless nerves sear my ventricles.
The creative will will snap your cheekbone—
hush, soil, remains.
Look at the blank between us
squeezing my shoulders.
after all this busying of body, resisting rest
like a toddler hurling her blanket through the night,
after all these efforts manifesting goals, dreading
rejection, willing perfection like a cheerleader
More insatiable than the desire to hoard,
Your fans say death’s a foreign coincidence.
They also say a forgotten coin’s never
Spent, but its odyssey costs us a day.
In 42, you slid like theodicy.
In Get on Up, you put an omen’s plaything