Category: Poetry

My father rapes me every night and I cry. I don’t like him in my bed—until I do. Poor child, so young, no voice, only legs spread, open and aching, I grow to love him. He yanks his pajama bottom strings leaving me alone in a puddle of goo.   Leaving me alone in a…

The first circus clown was a woman. Painting her face came easy to her; She had been doing it for years. Makeup made the scars go away, Or so she thought. Now, she wore it like war paint.   The giant red nose Held the broken one together. Like plaster from the doctor who believed…

I Arkansas and Tennessee in 1927   The Dakotas and Nebraska in 1993   Grandma on the roof, muddy cane and goodbye   Farms becoming reservoirs of mud   State Farm and Allstate prepping commercials   Waters recede along with college plans   Soybeans and hope are planted again   Bismarck shelters and Omaha warehouses…

On the far side of the lake, they’re calculating how to shake me from my bench so I’ll leave my lunch behind.   Despicable – these ducks who seem innocent enough, yet who will trouble waterways to ruffle my peace with unrelenting eyes.   I admit every staring thing unhinges me: the maple peering into…

Maybe they are paper airplanes, or goosenecks made from linen napkins, clappers taken from every bell within fifty miles. I imagine that, when you gathered your train, to get into the car, streamered with tin cans that rattled newlywed the whole way home, grains fell from the hand-stitched fabric with a hush. I feed you…

I was working day shift at the County Shelter, 102 degrees in the tattered shade of that street and this kid, maybe 5 or 6, had been scrubbed clean, her hair oiled for lice. Her teeth rotted brown   from sucking juice bottles to sleep, she was busy climbing over the dirty couch in the…

after Wayne Holloway-Smith   Sara without the H (the princess is not Jewish but Arabian), Sara Kookaburra in the old gum tree, Sara who struggled to sharpen B+s into As, Sara who sees double, Sara under wraps, Sara in the brook (her natural habitat), Fire Hen Triple Gemini Sara. Skeleton crew Sara, Sara Solo, Sara…

What if Venus had risen not from the froth of the sea but from a pool on a farm in Iowa or Minnesota with tower silos of grain as her backdrop as visible from the kitchen window as in the camera lens at the very moment wind sweeps her auburn hair to stream like a…

                                         once a woman went to the mountain alone NEVER say its name aloud, or you will wake the     from                               …