Pink Flamingo
In the temporary trailer park made permanent, we marry, look for work, give birth. We fix up trucks or let them rust for months, propped up on blocks in…
In Raymond’s Barn
Old cart slumped over its wheels, a cat’s cradle of cobwebs in what was the manger—and a shanty town of pick-up-stick cages, each containing a frantic thrush. We have…
Tapestry of Blood
A steer hung from its hocks, stream of plasma under my boots, water-thinned. The butcher works rhythmically. Hands pale and firm. The steer is a hulking, swiveling shadow. The…
Elegy for Richard Dawson
These are the things that do tend towards miniaturization— shore towns, ocean liners, fitful poetry, extreme weather, city of Cambridge, the mild. All of a summer day from Magazine…
To Tonakeera Point
The road from Louisburgh through an intersection toward Killeen, got pokier and stonier with wreckage and walls and boatloads of early, Mweelrea Mountains looming in fog, the ocean thrown…
AUDIO DESCRIPTION OF “A REALISTIC VIEW OF BOSTON COMMON” HOUSED IN THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
MEANWHILE, THE EYE RUNS AHEAD, THE MIND WANDERS This embroidery was made by a young American woman named Hannah Otis. Embroidered clouds, It depicts our…
La Vita è Bella
I know what happens in the end. I’ve seen the movie many times. The young son makes it. The father, he dies strutting cheerfully for his son in…
Fire in the Hole
Once I was air- borne, brief gust, thrown from the hot white metal of a car— do I have to go? I asked the paramedic. He buckled me…