Echos from the distant past
Hide out in dusty stations
Waiting for the Midnight train to Georgia.

Feet ******* with burning cramps
Stumble through the buttercups
That always used to turn chins yellow.

But my-oh-my there’s cherry pie
Baking in the oven
That used to cook on Douglas Street.

Good grief never did exist,
I’m sorry Charlie Brown-
You need to find a new phrase.

The Ferris wheel goes up and down
Without a sound except for all
The children screaming as they fall.

Why did my Daddy **** his hand off of my leg
When Mom walked past the bedroom door.
Why can’t I manage to forget

That I have nothing to remember.
            ljm

Every winter morning around ten
the shortbread sun tweeds its fingers

through this drowsy gauze, insistent
& curious, leaving slices of shade

like blades across the rug, arranging
itself like a mask across me -

today it squints over a killer's face,
for the cats rounded a mouse

beneath the liquor rack, broke its leg
at least, there was no saving it,

only hastening a sad end
& stopping its fear and pain.

Cats of course were furious,
their instinctual ritual interrupted

by unwanted mercy, by gentle hands
they now can't understand.

I drown the poor gray life,
& though I know we're both flecks

of nothingness in the absurd
entropic vacuum latte of universe

I feel a tremendous sympathy.
After all, what are our lives

except this same, but in slow motion?
We hunger - we risk and chance it -

sometimes we find the crumbs -
sometimes the swiping paw -

until one day the water rises over us
as the morning sun climbs in the window.

Dear A------,

I remember you at my sister's wedding,
you had hands of wild river,

& clouded beach was in your hair -
I was halfway through a sober year

sitting in a rattan bastille chair
watching the sea fashions,

my ear full of jailbreak children -
but I was thinking of night shapes,

things transformed by the dark -
I thought of your recipe: lost keys,

waning crescents, streetlamp breezes -
how strange and free I felt right then,

evening's cousin dressed to the nines
under trees bent to ferocious shade.

Then years passed: another marriage
disappeared into ribcage landslides

& mind riots, jobs were just smoke,
then it was Halloween and I was 44

& I was in New Orleans.
I wondered if you claimed it

the way I once claimed DC -
ambushed by a lost heart

that crept up into me in the suburbs
until only the city crux felt safe,

surrounded by new people
who might be doctors or hangmen.

I missed you that Halloween night,
though I ate in the corner

of your restaurant before I was blinded
by the rain bustle and whisked back

into a hotel window. I missed you also
the next night on Frenchman Street,

& in Storyville and Tremé where I wandered
throughout the runny yolk mornings -

who's to know if you'd even recognize me,
they've been hard years since Ocean City;

until I see you next I'll leave this letter
like a sip of liquor kept in promise

of stories shared in a plank-barred dive
on Toulouse or Tchoupitoulas Street.

Yours, Evan

To Liz Arnold

Her slicing eye carved all
through me as she spoke

stories of marriage, cancer,
poems never to be written,

of garden stones and cocktails,
of **** coffee house parties.

What did she think of me,
more boy than man, sitting

in her worn maroon chair,
telling her of country miles,

of listless marriage, of nights
wide and deep and strange,

of the river bed of the heart,
& poems never to be written?

Liz stared intently, her eyes
dissecting; I never did know.

They build their gods by hand
on Frenchman Street -

cup by cup inside baroque bars
bearded by brine-iron galleries,

fronting veils of mourning-lace
over ruddy O-mouthed faces,

dotted with glitter-fizzed phone forms,
glass skins decanted into alleys

shoving light down cobbled brows
and back up the laddered spine of palms.

They fill their gods with song,
the hairy-starred sky a smoking mirror

that pushes the music back onto us
as we scroll night markets in slashes

of color and money, strangers dreaming
on each other, discharged from the dives.

They don't build their gods to last
on Frenchman Street -

every night is only walked the once -
dissolve your empires, let the words

plunge under the strange black lash
that drowns the eyes to sleep.

She wrote our love in water,
(the rain lived in her)

we drummed into each other
with blue Pontiac fumbles

breath skating our necks
& empty loops of denim left

in book-spilled footwells.
Our smiles cooked the dark

as we recalled the road
to Cincinnati, to see the college

on the hill, her mother
& her friend up front,

us in the back seat napping
(& then not napping whispering

with the wet of our eyes,
her fluent periwinkle

my coffee-steam pools),
hands so careful so careful.

She wrote our love in water
(the waves lived in her)

our names purling, creasing,
stirring, smoothing, gone.

Middle school, age thirteen:
that strange doubled feeling

when walking cinderblocked halls
painted calm institutional blue -

there I am, heart in hand,
clopping in too-big shoes

to the strobing gym to see the girls
in their new bright dresses,

our bodies and faces branching
into adulthood relentlessly;

to see friends wearing cheap new suits
& talking endlessly of Kelly and Molly,

of Sarah and cheerleader Brittany,
of the Other Kelly, Erica, and Erin

(some having thoughts of Bryan
& Kenny, Mike, and Other Mike)

Yet there is another of me
listening to checkered floor,

how the linoleum squares echo
as I stalk through emptied halls,

(how disturbing, when a known thing
is so reconfigured and unfamiliar...)

I reach the chaperone stand,
deliver my ticket from a hot palm,

step into the loud and wild parade
as the dimmed dance floor writhes

with pubescent shadows,
my shoes clacking and shining,

looking for Kelly and Other Kelly,
drifting to safer bleacher corners:

unaware that thirty years later
this night is still engraved

on the back of a breaking brain:
the year the harvest failed.