1. His left hook split your face and sent your brain to visit the farthest reaches of your skull, your head bobbing on a sea of fractured shouts receding into a single point of high shining song. 2. The cut kept opening up like a family secret. They made you stop before you lost the eye. You went to war, re-crossed the Atlantic, survived, came home, got so drunk at times that you let my […]
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 […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 