These Apparent Prodigies
You can hear everything from my porch — gibbons railing and teething through visitor spines, ...
Read MoreThe Flagellant
“… and the flagellant gathers his strength, his wounds burning, blood purging; his tiresome spirit tightening.” And he’s down to bare back, the swish, as he walks, of areca palms around his waist; on his head, the flaming swell of hibiscus on weedy greens. He’s yoked short, wooden sticks, crowned with iron points, and bound with a leather leash, the better for the scourge. In the air, blood and sod fret the mangosteens to turn, red fire thickening — and you whisper, sweeter… The ash-gold on the penitents’...
Read MoreThe Last Salt Kingdom
She eased out of a group celebrating a fiftieth high school reunion — her wide set and still blue eyes taking me in an instant back to summer glazed bodies swimming away whole afternoons at a bend in the Sandy River in John Yoakim’s pasture, where current cut a hole deep enough to swim, where silk black river bottom land grew dark green corn behind us, and wild plums in the fence row between, released sweet juice of rose colored flesh, sliding mouth to breast, feeding the madness of sixteen in a 1936 Chevrolet...
Read MoreMaureen
We don’t have to hate all people at all times. Maureen is a funny woman. She takes my taxi just to have an audience. She tends to talk on and on. She has no friends, just a cat who drools. She has no physical coordination at all and is the butt of everybody’s jokes even her own. It has been that way since she was a child. Now she’s a 41-year-old nurse who can make fun of herself, which is something even most saints can’t do. Passion...
Read MoreBetween your two weakest fingers
Between your two weakest fingers the quarter slips, your wish drowning half in moonlight half held down by your arm — you’ve got an hour in a meter clogged with ancient lakes and marrow with wings seeping through the altitude where north stays stranded in your bones juts from the curb and a little water for your heart — with the first handshake you will forget again, your wrist towed from beside some motionless glass filled where nothing else is thirsty. Passion...
Read MoreCommunication
It was always the same he’d stand on the corner in front of the kiosk playing his sax one note at a time like walking a dog the same deliberate gait step by measured step. “Are there enchiladas in heaven?” I’d ask him drop a dollar in his old felt hat that must have belonged to his father [they don’t make them like that anymore]. “Are there enchiladas in heaven?” I’d ask again wait for his answer that always came “bo ba be bot” a line of black...
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