When St Valentine came to the States he found work in a meat-packing plant living with some Slavs in a tenement just beyond the stockyards. Blue-eyed, stout, he broke down carcasses daily and the vagaries of a new language, naming his children things like Jenny and Fred and coming home smelling of offal and blood until Valentin became Valent became William, shedding the weight he had gained as a new-eyed baby— the crimson name of […]
I called both fights, the Armenian, then Adams, the latter spelling out his bad intentions with a nasty right hook, the former, though rusty, knowing every trick in the book. Oh, age. I could be proud that I’m never surprised but I’d trade it all for something unpredictable for once, not just Friday nights in sweats, texting my dad about the fights— I think this guy will win, and then he does. What did Teddy […]
And then they returned those birds to stratify the sky to incise with wings their variable trajectories and sometimes a sign is actually a sign like when one letter burnt out so that the neon spelled a name once spoken still known if barely but no I’ve heard that song before it seems if anything that hope precludes action and a chance sighting on the street is only routine entropy hokum really even today I […]
Where does a bird go when it rains this hard I’ve seen nests scribbled in lean branches but it doesn’t add up like how does fog mask emphatic rock, these glaciered exclamations? These mornings do not suit these days– sunrise giving in to rain the mountains fade the snarl of birds the feathered cloud that hovers up above the ave like modern augurs has been gone for days, God, what does that foretell?
There’s gradients of silence– the moment just before the PA system comes on, the moment just before the voice calls a code, the moment after . And every voice there ever was started as a child’s voice . Is that why we’re so eager to rush, to save? Or is it salvation by action, by lack of thought? . After a while you can tell apart each wing of this hospital by the timbre of […]
These nights predictable as the twelve-bar blues this life too it’s bound to leave you behind it’s bound to leave you and it’s a shame the rain passed through the sky so starless still there’s nothing outside the window nothing seeable and even I would sing if it could make that nothing less so
This night another night bus night impossible to discern its path while on it everything seen cannot be touched or not for any length of time as it’s not also on the night bus and the night bus doesn’t stop. Strange to go right through a town with its warm lights and conversations and glints of connection halfway out the door but the night bus moves on always the party’s in the other room the […]
In the woods a suggestive wind the trees creak like doors but opening or closing ones I’m unsure and the moss the grass the ivy shags that grace the maple trunks and sway are all more green than they have any right to be and buds appear on saplings like tongues that won’t be held and this light rain gets caught in wind and sun and rises blown like sparks the sun on the wet […]
Night drive just like the last night drive just like the city lights that paint the freeway pavement archetype of neon if only a heart could be trained to sit or stay I take it with me driving home about seventy it’s late which compounds its velocity but a heart can’t be trained and every night we both race home with only one of us arriving
Now an awful dream anemones growing out of my skin how the subconscious processes drowning and I watched cells dividing to herald more arrivals two four eight the biologically plausible nightmare of a scientist deep deep in sleep and under water.
OPTIONAL POETRY 