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My mother and I remained apart. My father came late to the party.

I was dusty, my ponytail all askew and the tips of my fingers ran red.

She asked, “What’s the weirdest thing you can do with your body?”

She began to see the word, or traces of it, wherever she went.

Who was responsible for my father not living up to expectations?

What’s the harm? Will you fight even the healing powers of love?

Ajax killed men and then animals thinking they were men.

I waited and waited, rethinking first sentences in my sleep.

By the time the sun was barely over the trees, they’d started burning.

Euclid stands in front of his lover’s door, open to the last hours of light.

Where my mom was wasn’t never far from the Myrtle Beach Days Inn.

His mother wasn’t there to meet him at his stop. She never was.

The cat was looking at me with an intelligent expression. It knew.

There was a shout, then a shot fired. I pressed the shutter again and again.

“We’re not like other species,” you say, a novelist at night.

I’m recalling his socks, the inked initials, the splashes of blood.

Condemned to an easy life balanced on the suffering in another land.

Salt provokes, tenderizes. Your wounds, your dinner.

Is that coffee you have, or the hell of fusion in your cupped hands?

Is anybody out there? Nobody answered, and I felt archaic as prayer.

The pen is mightier than the sword in the fretwork of a poet’s language.

“Leaving for war, Hayes wept. He didn’t just cry; he wept...”

If life was exchanged, who is to say it flowed one way?

She commands, under her breath, You must be the son.

Think how you move, how a room changes with your smallest breath.

Arrows shot by the halt at the lame,
 Opinions come and go just the same.


My mother is queen of buttons. She shows off the prized ones.

Beyond her ampleness, he stands a small man vanquished.