Red Tag
The old rancher’s chopped, buttery voice hummed as he told me my task for the day. “Tag the youngins’. Green tag’s good for breeding, yellow tag’s alright, and red for meat.” It was a simple task, yet it still made my heart ache.
There was eight calves in all. Three boys, five girls. He’d told…
Chagall Taught Me How to Drive
Through the Chevy rumble of a borrowed car, we waited for her baby to be born, our nights sliding under the tires like a Chagall painting of the wedding couple floating above town. The beautiful breasts of my girlfriend like frosting on a wedding cake. She steered me blindly across the road with o…
Crabs and Pines
When we moved here, the crab tree flowered like a sculpted ball on a stick, and the contorted pine seemed straight out of Horton-ville. We have pruners; we don’t use them much. Fourteen years, and the crab pokes at the sun porch roof, autumn star clematis winds through her branches, the contorted…
Making Love in a Double Wide
What I remember most about your bedroom was the view through one of the two windows that looked out onto a red maple. When we first met, I would watch the leaves on that tree change slowly from their gay summer green to an autumn maroon, as we lay, naked, untangled, on weekend afternoons, divorc…
The Dandelion:
The sky was bruised, and purple marks littered it. The sun had retreated behind a large cloud of smoke that reached out to it; the smoke was desperate to hide the sun from those below. Ginnie crouched behind a mound of rubble; the rubble had once been her home. She traced her fingers across a smal…
Call to Dinner
The woman’s body moves through the kitchen, calls others wordlessly to dinner, like the boy daydreaming by the brown pond, with dusk coming on, examining a tiny leaf as if he’s grasping the whole tree, and the little girl running through the field before darkness snatches the ground out from under…
The Clearing
Leo pushed through the tangled vines, creepers, and sawgrass toward the tiny clearing deep inside the willow grove. The pungent smell of things rotting filled the air. A little creek that spread out through the trees kept the ground sodden. Breathing hard, Leo followed Weiner, his friend’s face sp…
Blue Voyage III
heads of stone face the waves that rush / clapping against the body of the island shallow lip of white / against the rising of earth / flowering in sharp green trunks of life parabolic line of erosion / eruption etched into the rock / crags smoothed and jutting upright before the deep blue / warm…
Love Birds
It was raining, but Isaac Walsh wasn’t surprised. It was always raining. They’d had rain continuously for years, without relief. Remarkable, wasn’t it? He’d said so to Anne just this morning, but she’d only laughed in that careless way of hers, like wasn’t he an odd duck, thinking such things…
Faith in Flying
These unusual days, people driving or walking or talking are grating my nerves: tiny brittle petals of me, littered. Pink. At home, I crochet these bits into a shapeless sweater. But it’s not smooth. It’s seedy. Nothing lays flat. I put on my wings, instead, hedged by the cliffs around me. Flying…
How Fries Will Change You
I’m calling for fries over the counter full of fried food and grease while the chefs ignore me. Someone taps me twice on the shoulder as tears salt my lips. “What?” I snap, searching for a coworker’s face. The old woman from my table takes a step back. “Excuse me?” she says, her wrinkles contortin…
Bead by Bead
At the end of it my mother grew light. Seemed hollow the way bird bones are hollow. Mom could sit forever at the breakfast table to finger her silver rosary strung with blue glass beads that had small pocks As some flower seeds are almost perfect spheres but fall short have pocks, flaws. Mom said…
“Somebody to Love”
I bought this car to prove I could and now, as I wait to turn left a man exits the Quik-Stop, black sweats sagging, pantlegs shirred halfway up his narrow calves. He’s probably my age, maybe even a one-time middle-school messiah. He slouches down the sidewalk, knees hinging like a marionette as…
Daughter of Slovakia
She wore a bright blue apron and faded red handkerchief in her hair. She fed the chickens on a dusty field outside Bratislava. As the hot sun beat down upon her, she wiped her brow. She walked to the village every day to buy a fresh loaf of bread to feed her family. In the evening, she drank plum…
Black Converse and a Dirt Road
Maria Hope grabbed her black converse that sat by the screen door. Her mother always said that “those converse were a boy’s shoe,” but Maria found no offense in those claims. She tied up the mud-stained, white laces and then ran out the screen door, hearing it slam shut behind her.
“Maria!” she…
Mountains, Molehills
A pile of dirt dressed up in a mountain’s clothing A working man’s pile of rocks but a ball and chain for the drowning man a bucket of cement spilled across flowering dirt but the girl is known for crying wolf so a mountain has become a molehill while the dogs come at the blow of whistle tearing…
Trauma as Dreamer
I dreamt of that man’s body as a falling animal, draped in heavy cloth. I knew, somewhere, that by reaching him I could be young, enough to live. Between us were mountains, thickets dotted with lavender and rosehip. In the hillside, churches carved into earth so that even the spires fell below…
For the Kids
Sitting on the edge of a summer scene so my cigar smoke doesn’t bother anyone, watching the kids flop in the bouncy house, the invasion of uncles pulling their legs, the aunts: an admiring seashell blocking the driveway, and a council of grandparents seated in beach chairs on the lawn. Now that th…
Spring Gift
I think of her now, how she loved gardens, and the genuine grace of her soul That word she used for the slate of human construction, calling here and there to smallish birds Black dahlias, illustrative envelopes of sound, things no listening can hear The Cana Lilly, the big flowers failed state…
Half Truths
I didn’t know I spent most of my youth telling half Truths. I was born under your Floridian sun
Had my first crush witnessed by North Carolina’s Mountains Held my first library card under the guidance of Tennessee snow
And yet, I’ve always told you I was Mexican But wasn’t that the answer yo…
Anytime, Anywhere
Inside a single diamond of rain heaven might rest. You can be doing anything sliding towels into a cabinet Turning the page on an afternoon nap and tell in your bones the exact second When rain, any rain starts, when it stops. Aren’t deer, raccoons and trees like that also. Absolutely Married to a…
Some Call the Magic Hour Blue
Our second evening in Budapest, my need presses as if we are new lovers. I keep checking my watch for the magic hour, but it’s all magic: the wish, the tickets, the flight whisking us to this land where we thrive on cake and paprika. A breeze foretells clouds, drizzle, downpours. This is our last…
John Lennon at the Old Marquette Inn
Last night he was talking to Federico Fellini in the bar on chili night, who told him “I’m not afraid anymore of telling the truth.” John Lennon was celebrating his 84th birthday, as if the years no longer mattered. He wanted his whiskey. Like Jim Harrison, I said, who wasn’t actually dead like ev…
