Is it failing eyes or conscience
since we seem not to see how
Rodney stands alone exposed
to torrential rain in wind
teeming masses hurry past
umbrellas clash like swords
“Relativity: A Lithograph by M.C. Escher,” “Chores” and “Another Kind Man”
In life, I bugged my brother relentlessly
about Escher’s impossible staircases,
his floors and doors, his figures with no faces.
It looks like a prison.
It’s not.
“Panhandle my marble heart,” “The Crankcase” and “lost dogs in foggy nites”
Panhandle my marble heart
Put my lips,
in a lonesome tomb
spread gossip of me on the shorelines of ecstasy
as I fall down the ladders
of your purgatory.
“Anatomy of a Honeycomb,” “Basket of Needles” and “Cabin on Detox Island”
Post-mortem,
After having lived a life
In and out of mental hospitals
For what could only have been simplified…
Of attacks acute sweetness or withdrawal thereof
An autopsy was performed on me,
And a honeycomb for a heart
“Street Landscaping,” “Hoodie in the Wind” and “City Birds”
On concrete, brick and asphalt, filth sits atop. It doesn’t sift into the ground. It runs into the sewers but first it spends days, weeks, months lingering in puddles that don’t evaporate. Too much building shade and east coast oceanside atmospheric overcast
“Someone Else’s Stars,” “Hockey Night in Emmett County” and “Graceland”
The sun is our center
bringing light and life.
Painted on the walls
of Lascaux caves,
the sun illuminates
the bulls
and the Magdalenian
artists.
“Pangea,” “Blind” and “Self Portrait: Highjacked”
in the beginning
there were no delineations markers or boundaries shaping his from
hers
quotation marks he said she said
rivers mapping theirs from ours
“Magicians and Fortune Tellers,” “No Home-Maker Here” and “The One That Got Away”
pluck a single card from a shuffled deck
and there’s a one-in-fifty-two chance
that you now hold the two of hearts.
all our potential futures that we think exist somewhere
in maybe or one day
Water Babies
The brisk steps of heeled boots beat rhythmically against the hum of engines and horns. Skyscrapers tower overhead, leaving little room for light other than the billboard screens of advertisements and PSAs. Her gaze remains fixed forward as she moves within with the mass of people who surround her. The street ends at Central Park. She turns right along the waist-high stone wall that borders the valley below. Glancing over, she sees winter finches flit about cement walkways and barren trees.
Six Sleep Stories
My former mother-in-law complained of insomnia. Incessantly. She had a small army of pill bottles lined up on the kitchen counter: Tylenol PM. Tramadol. Valium. Klonopin. Sleep aids. Little helpers.
The Book of Dragonflies and Nana-Wai’s Garden
The fat gibbous moon is hours away from dropping beneath the curved horizon. Under that fat moon Nana-Wai glides through her garden, ghostlike. She’s old and there’s not as much of her as there was when she was younger. Her cotton shift, thinned with age and wear, like gossamer wafts in the breeze. It’s as if she is floating. Stiff bones and muscles find grace.
A Doctor in the House
My mother tucked the phone receiver between her shoulder and her ear, lit a cigarette and simultaneously dialed Aunt Rachel’s number.
I left home several years ago, but I’ve overheard enough of these phone calls to be able to recount this conversation. While they lived only two blocks apart and neither of them worked outside the home, my mother and my Aunt Rachel found enough drama in their lives to need to speak to each other every day.
“Derwent,” “Sunday” and “November”
The Derwent’s not in any rush. Green surf
Of trees, the rocky crests of peaks now still
Enough to watch their sister wind downhill
And salve exploited wounds of quarried earth.
“There Are No Words,” “Que Será – Mother’s Stare” and “Peace”
“There are no words…” with tragedy
Or times absurd or ends unknown
Is tragic in its own accord
For words may be all that we own
“Saturn,” “One” and “Cemetery Walled”
As another moonlight saunters
on inlets,
let’s agree Saturn can set:
the moons will use its rings as a table,
and as euphoric as their blurry mind
can be like
MDMA intoxication.
“Promotion Review in the Afterlife,” “My Thieves Are Lonely” and “Odd Boy”
“We’ve been thinking,” the angels say
(they work for Krishna now—God knows
he’s got too much to do, what with all
that attention the rich demand these days)
“and we’re going to send you back as a cat.”
“Listening to ‘The Lark Ascending’,” “Last Hours” and “In Starlight”
I listen to
swells
and
falls of the lark
in Williams’ grand tribute to
Albion
“I Push Back the Images and Climb into Bed” and “What Stays”
The blanket tucks my head away from the world.
My eyelids shut.
My knees fold into my stomach, and then
the plane you boarded to Orlando
crashes in Georgia before you can make your way to me.
“Conspiracies,” “Return to Kansas” and “I See Now”
The random caws of crows
I hear as I unload the dishwasher.
I look out to see three birds gathered
round the war memorial
and the flag.
Canned
When I wake up in the morning, the snow has stopped falling, but outside my window I see a big mound of the stuff in the driveway. I rub my eyes and sigh, realizing that the mound of snow is actually a car and that I’m going to have to dig it out fast if I don’t want to be late to work. I throw on my khakis and dark green shirt, Harold’s Grocery sewn on the left breast pocket in yellow, loopy script, and then stare back at the car just for an instant to contemplate the freezing temperature of creamed corn.
“hate | thirst,” “Sahara’s siren” and “release | remain”
for those that are tempted to drink from the fountain of hate
beware of that bittersweet nectar
even as it feels like honey running down your chin
you will realize its acidic burning nature
as it bores a trail into your soul
Code Red
It sounded like a creaky door. Or a lazily deflating balloon. Or a territorial humpback moaning out its claim to the waters of the North Pacific.
What it didn’t sound like was lungs. At least not healthy, normal lungs.
Mai Fitzgerald closed her eyes and adjusted her grip on the stethoscope. It was all there—the prolonged expiratory phase, the diffuse high-pitched wheezing, the hoarse… junkiness classic for chronic bronchitis. She imagined the patient’s breath, hot and frantic, scrambling to make it through her tight, scarred airways.
The Missing Years
There are empty spaces in my photo album, gaps in time that float like apparitions in their possibility. Just out of reach, hazy and transparent, like smoke from a Cuban cigar that was there and then, suddenly, gone. I turn the pages, searching for the missing years, but find no trace.
At the Edge of a Long Lone Land
I used to watch her walk the Coast Path every morning through my grandad’s old spyglass. Sometimes, she’d stand rooted to one place, looking out past Pordenack Point at one of the small fishing boats, or a merchant ship, and I could picture her in my imagination as a young Penelope searching for her Ulysses. It struck me at times that perhaps she was looking for a piece of herself out there—that maybe she’d given away a piece of her heart, or perhaps misplaced it.