The man stands here at the edge of our road crowned by a fur Cossack hat robed in leather jacket pondering the muddy ditch as if the answer runs there to questions that sit in his dark eyes, rimmed by something not yet grasped, some translation not yet rendered. The woman bore eight children before
1. Black waves break in full moonlight, making liquid silver slip across the strand. We step back from the froth, stand in the roar of surf, arms wrapped around each other while all the fires on the beach burn low and I dig my toes into icy sand. 2. Graceful branches brush the sky. It
as one of my desperate prayers. I am waiting to be unfolded like a guest towel in your hands. Desire stole away on the four a.m. train, crazed fool. Pressing the bullhorn more than necessary, she shatters the neighbors’ dreams into the icy shards of wine glasses. Through the slatted blinds, a stranger in a
______instead of sleeping: empty wine bottle reflects the glow from used cigarettes solitary tea rose incenses my arm faint sirens call thin clusters hide dippers in a slow drift Aaron Neville crickets & cicadas freed from little monsters stuck to red brick harmonize instead of sleeping: reefer rising in new moon sky eight foot cherry
When he scratched his matted gray hair that looked like the throw rug on the floor, the only reminder in his house of his grandmother, the one who raised him with the belief that he was sweet gold, he cried, not the whimper cry of a baby, but the hollow cry of an adult so
Venice Beach Sunday afternoon roof she was completely naked tanned nipple-pierced and blown-out-on-crack surrounded by stud muffins, surfers and gangsta rap wanna-bees she shouted her free speech anthem at a pair of sandaled black women, who as fearful pedestrians wanted nothing but a little air after too many trips to the brunch buffet table when
Escape beckons their type. ____Son, nervous on Ritalin mass-produced by Disney ____paying homage to deities. Mother tells him he should not forget ____those others…the unlucky ones. Mother and son pray together. ____A father has never been in the picture. Little in the air smells of artfulness. ____Science structures my chameleon life. Maybe the best thing
He was shaped by the absence of earth, day-dried clay scooped away to reveal the clean smell left when mud failed to kill him. Stranger’s hands drilled into his dying, lifting him like a bridge to starlight. His body arched in homage to fingers and eyes pricking holes in nighttime, the blackest dirt of all.
El Parque Central, Antigua Guatemala two young girls in traje crying their mother laughs and comforts them and returns to work selling camisas to tourists seeking some local color the older homeless woman is still on her feet, her thin dirty legs poking out from the colorless shirt that’s covering her this cold morning I
And through the gaps between the bodies tightly pressed around me I see others staring at this young white guy as he sucks the lesions on his skin, bites off the festered, clotted blood; scabs on his face, scabs on his arms. Spatters of blood on his white shoes. I don’t notice his other clothes,
