Our children’s toy snake lies inert in the driveway. Although it’s almost Easter, the Christmas lights are still up. But I won’t mention it because I have no right to decorate a house that is no longer mine. The daybed my mother
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Cold winds fall down from the mountains, turns on the river and runs into the trees. Soon the sun will drop into the ocean. Rain coats the world in water. She says she’s dying. I don’t know her well, but we smoke
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Morals stream like sweat from a God hawk-eyed and anxious at every sparrow. She sits quietly on the bus, reading the news. Where’s the child who would have shaken her womb? The mountain waits for the land to be still to begin
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To the dumpster in the alley behind the Salvation Army, the blue one for donations of clothing, someone had taped a scarecrow on his pole who’d seen better days, missing an eye, starved for straw, hands bound together in supplication. I tried
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After the Great War and the boom back home men were big babies or dead from the waist down. (A long grave along the Western Front mined ghosts for the factories within thighs.) When the séance to resurrect bodies was published and
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They both had their way of looking at the heat. The girl called it a heavy fog waiting in the corridor of the delivery room. He called it a bully’s last words before the home bell rang out. A long dull thud
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You saw the painting in a gallery window every day on your walk to work and wanted it, so you smashed the store front with an elbow and grabbed the frame. The painting was the real genuine article—a Magritte oil of two
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