Blue Angel
After the Blue Angels on Sunday bursting between buildings at North Avenue Beach, whipping sound like circular thunder around Lake Michigan, smooth and menacing as sharks, dipping jetwings like fins as they screech past each other from opposite sides of the lake almost colliding from where we watch but thin as sideways angel fish above the still boats, your behavior on Monday afternoon wasn’t so bad, talking a blue streak, gesticulating a wingspread in your yellow shirt ideas smooth as metal and mercurial, too slippery to refute. Tonight you will bike home from work, as usual, eat the...
Read MoreRachel
All night you dream of Rachel: her half-fisted fingers and pimpled cheeks, her sticky new lashes, her flannel-heavy bottom in the crook of your arm muttering the morning’s mess. Her mouth round as a fish’s, searching for a nipple in her sleep. Eyes blink, ears blush, day’s first pink flush touches the room and you, who measured the night by infant cries, now turn to feed her the moon, breast milk, a fleet of years, as she feeds you the tyranny of her...
Read MoreSibling Rivalry
A flame in my throat, so hot it scalds like cocoa, my breath a yelp, an angry stitch in my side, feet slapping the sidewalk, saddle shoes too tight, shorts too taut, my older brother so far ahead, cantering like a pony, all slim and horsehair sleek, John Wayne tall but spare in the chest, legs and body chestnut, racing to the roar of the sun. A flash at the corner, and he’s gone. I falter, hunch over, throb for air, sob in, gasp out, legs on fire, totter home, fall onto the porch. He hands me an ice cream sundae, a dollop of extra fudge on top. Bare arms barely touching, we let the...
Read MoreBaby
A small locked heart, webbed and half fish or a netted bird; swan and wings drinking brewed tears; unfinished as a jot, ready to shatter the cage, a shout locked in a box. The first chapter; a story full of air.
Read MoreThe Lost Poem
Shoved in a jacket, a folded heart, a breakage of notes about the body fascism. Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch. So sing then a song about Oswiecim, about the ice on the Sola, about Silesian firs, tell the story of a train hanging under stars, late from Hannover. Tell me in hushed tones about a hole in a roof, about rushed concrete, about the sinking to ash. Then throw this poem into the sun. No paper can carry this...
Read MoreCloying
Sitting on the chrome bench in their room painted taupe green and the doctor saying the word cancer the black orange sun fighting the old flicker fluorescents, I’m this pile of silt now magazines into the ill past vast numbers of magazines into the far everything you remember the little house all the people now dead someone’s in the leaves the doctor with his eyes like pennies still looking at you speaking in his clipped...
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