Within the History of Severed Heads,
Mike the Chicken kept on clucking for eighteen months. Don’t expect that from a beheaded human yet a wine-vine growth pours out a story that Anne Boleyn tried […]
Smoke Break
In between his smoke puffs,my brother Barry saidwith a fresh split lip, “You know some Neanderthalswere redheads like me.”“Does that make you a Neanderthal?” “They’re our cousins.Maybe I’m my own […]
My Place is Here
I. I do not see I do much good, but I cannot leave. Some youngster holds on to me convulsively. I do what I can: stop with him, sit near […]
I Hold the Marrow
“In Brooklyn, in an old vault, mark’d by no special recognition, lie huddled at this moment the undoubtedly authentic remains of the staunchest and earliest patriots from the British prison […]
In the Age of Blood and Heat,
I breathe. The surgeon removes loose splinters of bone from the neighborhood of a soldier’s wound. A bloodless, brown-skinn’d face with eyes billowing in blue flame grit, he bears […]
Breakfast at Hamburger Haven
A week after the Apollo 11 landing, I sip a fresh pour of coffee before my scrambled eggs and toast among a line of Saturday customers at the shared […]
Complicit
I slurp coffee with cream on a Lake Merritt bench across from waters flowing like imported coffee into commuting mouths. Shit. Underpaid or unpaid hands surely plucked these Columbian […]
An Oakland Aubade
Our eyes snap open into the shards of a shattered night after sleep nested on our branch bodies. Outside our open bedroom glass, Black-Crowned Night-Herons sleep in their familial nest. […]
Tom Lookalike
After I watched Top Gun up in my room, I dyed my blonde hair black, threw on some aviators, and grabbed my dad’s car keys. Oh, and I had to […]
A Lake Merritt Nocturne
Beside lapping water, I wander on Lakeshore Avenue. When a leashed Golden Retriever yelps, I’m startled out of my stupor in a black pool between lampposts aglow. […]