A Drunken Stumble

The sacred babe of your mother’s eye glowing gold of train sets and playgrounds and your stuffed Benji to hold so closely over a flame in the kitchen and the heat only comforts your spite. These are Tuesdays in bed past bus stops and scholarships and a coffee liquor stolen from the kitchen’s top shelf….

Want

All that’s left to remember is the feeling of faces, three thousand miles from touch. Etches left in a sketch erased: Carefully held on a Greyhound, folded along creases, slipped into a shirt pocket close to heart. That animal bore no animosity but in a moment flared its spite, flared the impulse to bleed its…

Murderous Love

I’ve picked the wrong major,ten minutes into the second classI can already tell thatthis isn’t the place for me:  Latte cups and politics,scarves and Doc Martens,soft spoken emotions.This flower is a metaphor for your trauma.  And the Professor has asked me to share my thoughtson a particular subject,on a beautiful tragedy. Tennessee Williams, by god,…

Weekend Walks

I know these streets from memories, crooked cobblestone bricks tripping sneakers, high heels, late-night waltzes home from bars. I know the storefronts, eateries, cafes — the corner you’d meet me for evening bogies, midnight chats, meandering stories. Your hair a faded blonde, your face a jaded youth. I know this town from a world in…

Old Soul

Gone for the winter but I’ll be back in the spring. I’ll be back for the warmer weather -back for family and holidays, my mother and sisters and friends. I’ll be back for the great lessons of seasoned professors and pages, and pages, and pages I would’ve read by the pool in June, or at…

Capitalist Prophylactic

The grass was short on the ball fields. Lazy Sunday afternoon, and the park was mostly empty: alongside the poolhouse on a picnic table, behind a row of tall firs, the girl was telling him about her campus. She made it seem wonderful, the library and the classes and the student activities. She was two…

This piece is numerically titled

We came here looking for your mother’s seeing-eye dog. The park is bright and green and not too crowded, and the open spaces seem to swallow sound. There are stores across the street, apartments and the lazy midday city traffic. We thought the dog had perhaps come here. I let you walk ahead to lead…

Courage 7 miles from town

We used to make campfires out of sticks, bonfires out of pallets and the couches we’d find left behind in the clearing in the woods. A long dirt trail seven miles back, far removed from the indolent suburban roads. This is where we roamed under starlight. Midnight, the blackness viscous between the trees. We backed-in…

God found a better job

I hear echoes in the walls, the rattlings of a voiceless savior. Bills pinned to the pantry, I can only sit here and drink and clear my head enough to think that maybe there’s a way to clean the water from our floors. It’s been pooling here a while, coming up to our shins, late…