Breathing Trouble
Five bottles of dollar-fifty beer had come and gone when I saw her glide into the bar and sit at a booth behind me. Above the bar, the Budweiser horses pulled their plastic wagons of beer into infinity. I saw her in my peripheral vision, smooth and solitary, wearing a white T-shirt tucked into faded […]
Kiko
Kiko says a broken vessel doesn’t cling to the remaining droplets, but I strive to believe it’s so. “Anything newly broken savors only the dew. It has nothing else to offer,” I explain, waving my tawny arms with the thick webs of hair in an angel’s arch above my chin. “I relinquished the dew when […]
Everything I Have Is Yours
“You´ll never guess who called me this afternoon,” I can recall my mother saying. It was dinnertime, and she was at the stove spooning something lumpy from a frying pan into Tupperware. We–my father, my brother Lester, Bradley Willis, and I–were at the opposite end of the kitchen, sitting around a pink and gray formica […]
Late Words for the Moon
There you are, old moon, old rock-in-the-sky, still holding when I rise on shaky legs for water to wash the bitter powder of the sleeping pill from my tongue. How have I come so untethered from your pull I must be chained to the time-release anchor of these capsules? Tonight, all I have failed to […]
Outlasting Energy
I’m looking out the window for the promised meteor shower, rain of fire the heavens release, while my thumb walks a dry pattern on the brasswound top strings of the guitar; wood’s vibration against the bone above my heart reminds me man’s first instrument was probably the drum. This room, hollow as a drum, trembles […]
