To kill correctly takes calculation. Down to a science. Arsenic cacodylic acid. Know water and rice on a cellular level. Make sure no surviving seed can be collected and planted. Because even a small seed assures survival. Because mortars, grenades and bombs cannot destroy a grain. Because our heart is made of seeds. Know what
this morning weaving Chi in the garden invisible ball in my hand * Halong Bay battle distant memory smoke from Gulf of Tonkin * did the atom ever know its destiny how our hands create? A student asked me, “Why do your people believe in dragons? * river birch – undressing in the
I hate the word, and I guess that’s why it is said? People love to hurt one another. It is what makes us human. I do love dogs. They don’t seem to be evil unless humans make them that way. Dogs can maul and they can sniff out bombs. They’ll get as close to you
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house. I took a chair outside and watched the sun. In the sixth month
We walked five blocks to the elementary school, my mother’s high heels crunching through playground gravel. We entered through a side door. Down the long corridor, decorated with Halloween masks, health department safety posters— we followed the arrows to the third grade classroom. My mother stepped alone into the booth, pulling the curtain
we all went to town one day went to a store bought you new shoes red high heels aint seen you since This poem can be found in the volume, A Taste of the Knife: Poems (Modern and Contemporary Poetry of the West). Think about how the poem made you feel. Are
The comet taught us how to watch the war. The comet contended that fire is romantic and recommended we each behold it alone, envisioning out there somewhere our next lover, craning up at this same sky. Was the comet simply endeavoring to keep us divided, I asked it, and the comet did not reply. Then
When he tells the story now he’s at the center of it, everyone else in the house falling into the backdrop— my mother, grandmother, an uncle, all dead now—props in our story: father and daughter caught in memory’s half-light. I’m too young to recall it, so his story becomes the story: 1969,
I place a photograph of my uncle on my computer desktop, which means I learn to ignore it. He stands by a tank, helmet tilting to his right, bootlaces tightened as if stitching together a wound. Alive the hand brings up a cigarette we won’t see him taste. Last night I smoked one on the
Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every
