“OVER YOUR CITIES GRASS WILL GROW”

1
Teenage waitresses shiver naked in the train yard, machine guns poking at them and the tip jar empty.

2
All light is interesting, a face full of stubble, and all because of a hole blown in the tower, with the cannibals and madmen belching fire, and morning declared against the law.

3
A moose walks across the field. The sun is setting. Maybe from a great distance you can see an old woman in a dark shawl carrying an unrecognizable bundle into the gathering gloom. It’s kind of beautiful in a way, a place you’d like to go if you knew how to get there.

Based in part on sentences found in the online edition of The New York Times, August 10, 2011.

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TOOT SWEET

1
Landscape
without trees

or anything.

Not even barren –
nothing.

2
Something passed overhead,
the world’s first.

I told her what I wanted to be.
Who, she laughed, you?

3
The outlet emptied
into a dirty white hand.

Merde!

(Anything
said

sounds
better

said
in French.)

4
Fields of sunflowers
that go on all the way

to the Great Lakes
and Saskatchewan,

take me in your mouth.

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DREAMING IN RED

1
I was nothing, no one, plunging across the sky, a man’s face that wasn’t mine, the silence so acute it glittered like silvery gray barracuda disturbing the depths.

2
What do you want, Howie? What? Only the thing I was promised, goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace to gather somewhere and wait for me. Oy! Under various rubble, I’m broken and mended and broken again.

3
I had someone else’s blood dripping into me all night. My own blood was sick. A nurse woke me up every fifteen minutes, once in the middle of a dream where I was younger than you and beautiful and flying in echelon over the dry white oceans of the moon.

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FAMILY SECRETS

1
I look up the word
“fugacious,”

though I know
I won’t ever use it.

My mother’s old apron
hangs on a hook.

I wait for the rain to stop
and then remember

she’s dead.

The caption asks
which things don’t belong.

2
My people were peasants and horse thieves
in the old country. An erratic uncle
hanged himself after they came to the new.
Sometimes he waves. No one waves back.

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