One red-winged blackbird can’t begin
Without the other, hidden in the cedars.
Listen, listen, listen,
For he struts between

The room was airless and damp,
the sheets a skin of sweat.
The greasy feather pillow
curled like a postage stamp.

As we stood by the casket, Momma gasped,
through tears, “Look hard! You must remember her!”
I looked hard, tried to memorize the slight
malicious curl of her thin lips—too red—

At 1.4 million atmospheres
xenon, a gas, goes metallic.
Between squeezed single-bevel

The obverse of the sanguinary Turkey
Carpet I figured I was looking for‚
Festooned with geometric shapes in murky

Hakeldama

The priests have a problem
on the borderline of ethics and accounting

Nothing melodramatic, it’s just when the sunlight
came in through the wired windows and laid itself
down on the green floor, it was nice, we liked it
there, then, playing our games. And like kids

Very woman the tomato
cut up cool and floating in gumbo,
so rice the okra swans!
Spoons prowl the soup, poking flotsam:

Tuned to 104.6 on the FM
dial, the boom box purrs Golden
Oldies I jerk awake to. You
turn beside me, to me, but turning,

I think you would understand
my craft of writing, how it makes of me
your king and creature in this no-man’s-land
of the moment;