My father loved fireworks. My brothers tell me that before I came along, he would, each Fourth of July, take a babies’ bathtub out on the crabgrassy front lawn and fill it with water from the hose. Then he’d put into it a thing from his lab: sodium metal, a…
Mom (age 91) recited this while we sat in the HomeTown Buffet in Eugene, Oregon with our piled plates in front of us: Little Miss Muffet Went to HomeTown Buffet And was eating her dinner one day Along came a spider And sat down beside her…
I kneel behind him Pick up my hair, half per hand And wrap it around His worked-out, pork-fed middle And there’s hair left over still to bend We pull the light in from the music Even in Kansas I wander with my wrinkled-fairy body…
Once in the early 90’s in India I was very ill with mercury poisoning. A reckless dentist had assured me no dental dam was needed as, with a hot drill, he removed eleven amalgam fillings (I could feel the little shards of metal in my mouth) over a space of…
One evening two thousand of us sat with folded legs on cushions in a vast oval hall with a marble floor and walls of mosquito netting. High overhead arched a roof made of tough fabric supported by metal beams. The tropic darkness clung closely to the structure, but we sat…
Ok, this is a big fat rant, about two things almost impossible to find in this consuming-mad, insectoidally-voracious, provide-anything-whatsoever-and-somebody-will-buy-it world. I’ll start with the bread, ha ha, and work up to the bras, though it just sounded better to put the latter first in the title. Ha ha. (I’m full…
It’s good for things to lie down Under snow Under snow We too will have to be Tucked under Black-armed under Into the gap, and gap Again A man old enough for wisdom Though few do know Breathes through tooth-holes Laughing…
I was on Ko-Pi-Pi, an island off the southern tip of Thailand, to rest after a gruelling work trip to Japan. I was with a boyfriend, a not very nice one (insecurity made him arrogant; weariness me intolerant) but in that place we did not squabble – the heat and…
I was boy crazy for forty years All I wanted was the flayed whale Its huge red flesh And the senseless drumbeat Which would beget no kid. Then one morning I woke up And both the thorn and the rose Had lost meaning.
They’re paired up Coupled up All over the land Man slid in woman Woman in man Mostly they’re chunky Heavy with fat But the flesh it is humming Murmurous in that Lying down gently All over the land Man lies in…
We’re driving home as dusk comes up out of the air over the flattish land and turns it all inwards. Over the hills slight as breathing, from within the ground, creeping slowly but sure, grey and mauve and deeper darkness come – turning things over like a mouse turning in…