Number 7

poetry
1964   They found someone who knew someone, in Brooklyn where it would be done. They knew she wasn’t far along. He gave her cash. She went by train while…

Pink Flamingo

poetry
  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

poetry
  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

poetry
  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

poetry
  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

poetry
  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…

La Vita è Bella

poetry
  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

poetry
  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…

The Dogs

poetry
  The dogs began to bark. The dogs were almost always barking. Whenever someone would approach the house or just walk by, the dogs would bark. But C and S…