Things weren't the same as before, you didn't have to play nice anymore, you just played it loose, off the cuff. Any trouble and you could ad-lib. Bullshit was the new currency. He'd already had that in spades, so he figured he was ahead of the game.
Wouldn’t it be awful were you to chance upon a fishbowl
in which your only daughter morphs into some mermaid?
How would you go about rescuing her? Would rescue be
worth the pursuit? She would swim there freely in denial
This was a celebratory time for American culture, unless you happened to be Black. As viewers saw in Ken Burn’s documentary Jazz, musician Dave Brubeck recalls the return of his military outfit, his band, to their home base in Texas.
I reckoned my twin brother was using a time machine when he died. He developed the thing at home, while on sabbatical from his job as a poetry professor.
But those were empty meanderings, the
Solace of ruined moments and
Beatific outcomes, captured in thoriated
Aluminum cages, bound to the page with cheap tape
I’m not copying the vocabulary words Miss Hiller squeaked out with her stub of white chalk. Instead, using my crayons, I’m drawing a picture of her inside the back cover of my phonics workbook. I’m going to name it “Hag-face Hiller, the Fourth-Grade Killer.”
under a bridge, under cardboard, or here at the limit exposed at one of the crossings around Hastings & Main, on pavement never ceded
As if his wounds are
family members, he’s become
kinder since his accident. Sun’s
heat against her back, she gazes
down into that curtain
praying hands
deploy hidden marigolds in the air
for the finches singing
the death of plastic
outside my skull
I wish to meet my son, who was unborn when I decided to
openly condemn the dictator and consequently
missed the chance to witness his birth and growth
I had thought, naively, that my action was for a better future of his life
