I know Daddy knows what he’s doing. Even when he’s quiet he’s thinking. The old man with tobacco sitting in his jaw like a tumor is our enemy. He would keep us from buying the truck we need that slopes on the weedy ridge of this junkyard. Because I amContinue Reading

for Big Benny A monarch’s image flitters across the honored on that glassy, black wall, floating sideways, backward, up, down, caught up in concentric wind loops across names, nearly 60,000 etched. A person with paper scratches a son with lead. She is gray, drained, rock-wrinkled. Old, fixed medals and buttonsContinue Reading

Its own metaphor for ineradicable nuisance, it plays at the mind’s edges, encroaching in the dullest greens, doffing the hat of a rude guest, last to leave the party. In some distant country it could be haiku climbing the walls in search of obscure interpretations, its tendrils reaching for meaningContinue Reading

I am come from earth And return to earth. Blankets of green grasses Dig into this earth. Sighing now, I stroll In hollows of earth, Never seeming to find My spot on this earth. Wandering onward With creatures of earth, I watch the aged and the sick Go back toContinue Reading

He presses down the pedal as he hastens through the holler, screeching around swerving curves before They take the Valiant like they took the old Fury and the houses on Job Street, on Love Street, and Food Street. Daddy yaks Valiant and Vietnam. Mama answers so and so. Little BrotherContinue Reading