Garden Club Outside it’s snowing wetly A woman sits in a maroon chair With a stripey calm design in it I see her from above Numerous ladies hum practical, Practical hymns Getting loaf-cake in the kitchen Filling up the chairs A huge…
I’m visiting Santa Cruz just now and my conclusion is this: the thing wrong with America, weird human consciousness notwithstanding, can be expressed in one word: cars. If there weren’t any, all these people would be milling about still, but that would feel cozy rather than threatening – because they…
Dancing in my mother’s living room in Oregon filmed by her significant other, Al Getty…
This book was published in 1974 by Red Dot Press, a division of Hanging Loose magazine in New York. I was invited to submit the manuscript for the first book-publishing venture of this long-running literary periodical. The poems and short stories are in chronological order, beginning with one written at…
dark pension hall you approach white and nervous in dark drug alert she killed you the mother stabbed that snake-slim tree white flesh home i have stroked in infinite undoing now you see her in doorknobs in dark…
The short-bladed knife slices pirate bread Candles light cheeks round above the fur like eggs in straw. We live in a boat’s duck-belly, six of us frying onions slicing bread by candlelight Oats falling like stars onto the green wood.
Night before last was one of the most incredible good earth things – Richard invited us over for dinner. We got there, bathed and shiny, long dresses, on our bicycles. I had made coconut – avocado cookies and brought them with a pale green cloth in an Indian basket, over…
This year is different from all other years. The flowers I sew together seem ready to slip suddenly into a deep green pool the palm of my hand. Sidewalk cracks widen when I approach like opening eyes. Trees take their breasts from their…
(a block from my childhood house ran the tracks; a nut-canning factory sat beside them, with a groundcover of crushed nutshells. I used to dream the trains got off the tracks and ran through the streets at night–) We are the crows. We stroll between railroad tracks, trading…
Astoria on the Northern brow of Oregon those pioneer names The Columbia, the Willamette still pulse out to sea The sun is but a moment older eyes closed only slightly more to all the rags and rages of the dangling stairstep days.
To Glen I. Out into the desert into tall night the family comes walking sad Okies, books’ images filming over their skins Invisible amoebas of words with slipping colors Not here, the family no brothers no father no desert boots…
We are trees together sleeping, exhaling shadows felled into cupped silence; our fluting has impassioned cows by moonlight. Banana slugs have lusted for our fingers, we have dug green stone from an ocean cliff. It shattered into white…
