Your blood has forgotten your name. It seeps though hidden channels towards the abyss. Ebbs out in heavy dark torrents. I don’t know your name. Not yet. Somewhere, a clerk, seeking your driver’s license, rifles through your bloody clothes. Meanwhile… Your blood drips onto the floor where I stand, and someone puts down a blanket … Continue reading
Give me the bleeding statues. His tall forehead is touched by a descending finger of light, his torso bulges the picture frame like an oak. He bears no smile lines or drooping nostrils or jowls of despair. But it was said that something jealous in the hollow of a … Continue reading
Running or thinking. Another phone booth disappears. Abridge between two ideas an empty room, the bed unmade. The room smaller than he remembered, half pink, stationary, the word bark on the dog’s mouth. Headlights circling in the sky. They woke him up. Time to go. Down to the station. The hospital. Bail him out. Run … Continue reading
It’s finally possible to microwave the perfect egg. I take a shallow bowl with Mandarin carp hand-painted on the bottom, puncture the yolk, before my daughters wake, before the peace of night is gone. I grate pecorino to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; Oolong tea in raku, on teak beneath a spray of roses. The crossword in … Continue reading
tea’s a brewin’ blow the dust out of the mug and don’t be so coy this time lay down and get what you came for storm’s a comin’ gather your sheets from the line but don’t make the bed this time let it lie open like a sore Continue reading
If you taste tears too often, inquisitive tongue, you’ll crave more salt on everything you eat, taste blandness even in the rarest meat. Tears tear, obscure the vision of the young, too many elders leave their loss unsung, often deny the pain they daily meet. Inquisitive neighbors murmur and entreat; tongue locks the secret grief … Continue reading
Halfway between Chicago and the coast, somewhere east of Laramie, I splayed an animal beneath the wheels at eighty miles per hour early on a starless August night. There was the thunk of it, the splat — and still the highway unwound through the blackened west. The gospelers from radio Del Rio scarcely paused in paving … Continue reading
Halfway between Chicago and the coast, somewhere west of Laramie, I splayed an animal beneath the wheels at eighty miles per hour early on a starless August night. There was the thunk of it, the splat— and still the highway unwound through the blackened west. The gospelers from radio Del Rio scarcely paused in paving their highway … Continue reading
If you taste tears too often, inquisitive tongue, you’ll crave more salt on everything you eat, taste blandness even in the rarest meat. Tears tear, obscure the vision of the young, too many elders leave their loss unsung, often deny the pain they daily meet. Inquisitive neighbors murmur and entreat; tongue locks the secret grief … Continue reading
tea’s a brewin’ blow the dust out of the mug and don’t be so coy this time lay down and get what you came for storm’s a comin’ gather your sheets from the line but don’t make the bed this time let it lie open like a sore Continue reading
Coe Review 