Cur pillaged
garbage bag

Tampons strewn
cans licked

Rotten pumpkins
beneath canoe

Neighbors argue
redneck chatter

Dead squirrel
atop  car

Wild garlic
crooked fence

Open door
pour coffee.

Jingle click
keys, hinge
squeak;

step on  five
gallon bucket,
hoist out

window, disappear
Durham Avenue,
walk.

I  hated the scent  of Old Spice and Vick’s
VapoRub in the old couple’s home,
and the stench of ****** diapers

in poverty’s  bedroom, and the stink of
*** and bacon grease in my friend’s
house;  when I remember these

smells I want to throw steel
at glass and cry into
the sun.

Beth figured she’d marry a man with a full tool box
capable of building a house anvil strong,
                              
a man who’d plug her good and help raise
children with squares jaws,

he’d  praise her Christmas fruitcake,
provide every American good thing;

she added
wrong.

Two Snowy Egrets land.

One is lame.

Surrounded by cattails.

The other ascends.

After  many years in the basement,
behind a green tattersall shirt,
next to a plum colored robe,
is my gray tweed sports jacket;
sadly hanging like an old man’s *******,

inside the left breast pocket rests
the funeral  program of a man
I have learned not to hate,
or to become a semblance,
and god ******, I have not;
I still have time remaining.

Two  and one half flights up a home built
in 1899, and eight steps on a pull down
staircase,  enter an attic, upon the pine
floor are carved the words,
I hate mommy.

Nothing remains,
not  one  rhizome,
stem, or hairy root

travels, shoots, or buries
itself during barren  fall;
only  impending winter

resides in my garden
this unpredictable season,
and it is waiting for spring.

You tied  shoelaces together
and tried to hang yourself
from McMillin’s
basketball
hoop.

The neighbors talked about
it for years over flapjacks
and grits.  

They couldn’t understand why
anyone would attempt
suicide. I knew
the reason;

you were homely
and dull, kind of
foul smelling

too.  You failed
at  death, me
at life.

In less than a year you digested
a Puerto Rican baseball player,
certified horse inseminator,
disc  jockey, your sister’s
father-in-law,  a woman
named  Genevieve
                 and me.

Not much left after the pan
is boiled dry; memories,
residue and grit.

You have a cute southern drawl
she said.

You are not brilliant but I like your ***
was the best  I could offer.

You from Mississippi?
No, southern Iowa.

Not much difference in men
all weighed and measured;

this, we both
understood.

Canada Geese wedge over the river
this evening as four Snowy
Egrets fish bankside; on
the Sixth Street
Bridge, a man

dangles  his pecker between the rails
and streams jaundice yellow, a Ford
squad passes, flashes a red
beacon and drives
on.

Remember the afternoon we watched
the police drag the lake searching
for the Williams boy as we drank
Dr. Pepper?

There was a hell of a crowd
you had both hands on
Shelly’s *** & she
****** down her

thighs when the kid
bobbed up, face
pale blue, eyes
wide.

I bring you pitiful news from home where
the large McDavitt family has  a strain of
lice that has become immune to all nit
killing  soaps  and  shampoos; joyous
information is, the clan moved from
the neighborhood.

The thought of loving

Brings me to you

Who I carry in my pocket

Like a needle

*** could be joyous

Or, anticlimactic   .

See, I am  looking
for the best lay
of the land,

between two hillsides
beyond concrete, asphalt,
where

there are only
red dirt roads
few tire tracks,

a place of birdsong
gut laughter,

hard work.

Leaves mound like
wheat  in silos,

I’ve trees that need pruning,
weeds in the fence line

beg to be yanked, a coyote
caroused in the chicken

coop and slats should
be nailed over

the void; seventy degrees
is predicted today

and no work will
be done.

The old ****** slowly digs holes
plowing with precision
he places acorns

under peony bushes
behind the old
windmill,
each

day he wearily climbs
the den  tree
curling into
his nest

as the neighborhood
tomcat watches.

If things worked out I might have
stood on an Olympic podium
holding a gold medal or

awarded a ten thousand dollar
check and a mahogany framed
certificate for winning

a Pulitzer Prize; instead, on good
days I run down alleys looking
for **** spots and comb

streets for drunks and lame
people who make for
interesting pictures.

We stand on the sidewalk
cousin Jamie and me, with

a bible in my right hand,
I drape my left arm

around her lopsided
shoulders and cold brace;

she seldom smiles,
even as the shutter clicks.

You probably think this poem is about
Lisbon, Portugal, where women
dangle your imagination like
a necklace of sun-dried
currants. No,

Lisbon, Iowa, a town twenty-two
miles removed from the 21st
century, where I stopped
for coffee, flipped eggs
and a place to ****
on my way home

from  god what  a day;
a man ordered a plate
of Rice Krispie bars
and tea—shuffled

his wallet for ten minutes,
made me nervous
like he was on
Thorazine;

it was the last
time I visited
Lisbon.

Doctor split his chest free
cracked  it wide  open
like a blessed pit

Then  doc tickled Gabe’s
heart with a scalpel
made it clean

Again he can go skirt
chasing and set his
**** straight

So the process can
begin again with
the pain

His teeth feral teeth
and putrid breath

does not correlate
with the pale shoulders

and soft ways of
the woman with him;

somehow they make
the Multiflora

rose, rise
and blossom.

She is soap smooth from Achilles
to scalp’s apex

for years contemplated
suicide

instead, she learned
the right nutrients

creates life that bursts
above all

else.

Slumped on an old pink couch, television
test pattern flickering off their biscotti
painted walls,  Pall Mall smoldering
on the rug beneath Jack’s fingers,
Lorene mostly dead, Jack might
as well be;  early a.m., dark.

I  am knocking on  doors,
open  them and hear me
shout across the U.S.A. :

I may be black as blindness
or rainbow hue,
but I am as
American,

as you.

She boils animal bones
for one  day,  up three
times a night to check
the rolling calcium

and within the mineral water
she believes are the dreams
of cultures like Jews
rising from

mass graves, missing faces
from family portraits, no
violence against young
or old;

she drinks.

I need to know
if you think of me;

winter is coming
and it often arrives
with unexplainable sorrow.

I wish all my writing  depicted gaggles
wedging south over mossy lakes.

They more often wander to  legs,
tangerine tongues, the taste

of sweat and smell of cheap hairspray;  
for thoughts like these, I feel no
                                          shame.

The wet smoldering scent
of burning dogwood
leaves

reminds me of the hours
spent in the garden
kissing

the soiled palms of
a woman tousled
from work.

I am like winter’s  bluebirds surviving
January instead of migrating
to  Guadalajara with kin

to eat  larvae & hover flowered
women with ***** feet who
breastfeed their

babies with gelatinous
eyes and coo
coo

coo, at the occasional
sight of the bluest
in flight.

With  fly rod in hand
grampa slowly walks up the hill.

I search my hair for ticks because  
cousin Charlie said your **** stands

a chance of falling off if one
bites you in the fall of the year.

Gramma’s hands
shades her eyes as she squints

from the screened-in porch
toward grampa, he is on his knees,

gramma’s arms
fall and she runs;

this will probably be my last trip
to the loch with my grandparents.

Awakens and
rises from his recliner.

Peels off diaper, ******
a bronze-orange  stream.

Drinks Sanka with cream,
eats two Little Debbie cakes.

Views MSNBC from 7 a.m.-noon,
consumes a can of tuna and glass of milk.

Sleeps  from 12:30-4: 00 p.m., television drones,
supper—a bowl of oatmeal and an onion sandwich.

Tapes on a new diaper, watches MSNBC at 4:30 p.m.,
falls asleep, he is 87 years and four months old, lives alone.

Our lives are pregnant with insignificance.  
Things like--pecker gnats and Chihuahuas,

fake bronze menorahs,  white t-shirts,
and plastic daffodils.  Good Mental

health demands we balance life’s  trivial
with significant concerns, such as--cost-free

drugs to feel less bad, dealing with suicidal
people who find homicide intriguing, predicting

a python’s hunger pangs and the why, of
Saturn’s four rings;  the wise know the difference.

The scent of your breath across
the horizon of my sternum

& the pull & clench beneath,
is tectonic; white birds
rise & fly, die
& descend.

We could have buckled to the sin;
two or three times before
the cost

came due.

Son, you were feral to remain within your sac;
the doctor slit your mother’s perineum
and you gasp breath.                                                          ­    

My  secret to you on that  day is the same
as I whisper today;  be the rare
pearl but do not

couple yourself to a strand, I did not raise
you to be like me,
not one bit.

I am at my best at early a.m. when I click
the radio on and listen to NPR
interviews of people from

countries like Scotland, Nigeria, and Italy;
not long ago I heard a Swede tell how
he pickles Harbor

seal meat,  and a day ago  a Mexican
who was shot through the tailbone
by a child with a .22 rifle

argued  her country has pitiful
accommodations for
the handicapped.

Learning of the Swede, Mexican,
and slain seals liven me;
and then the sun rises.

I do not know what become of
Frank’s biological right leg,

whether it was severed
and incinerated or he

was born with only one
and crutch bound until

fitted with his first
artificial leg.

I  do understand the look on
on his face after he unlocks

the prosthetic from his
femur and massages

the foot pain on
his stump.

I can not find the letter mother left me four days
before her death. I read it once and then placed

it in a cardboard box like you might a dull
knife or a ******* tin. The letter is

a part me, like Van Gogh’s severed
ear was to him. I want the letter

like love or sight; the way bone
                               needs marrow.

You have slaughtered my kind without
justification and planted red mums
to line the new concrete sidewalk
to your church; Sundays,
as you traipse our roots
we will listen to your
sanctimonious
secrets.

Some are lissome, jowly,
blossomed or pocked,  teeth

of old horses—eyes white as flour,
a few clubfoot with sisters

pregnant as October gourds.  Not
Norman Rockwell’s Americans,

but they are us and live in lopsided
bungalows with leaky roofs,

heaved sidewalks, bare
refrigerators.

Photograph an evening sunset
of a lake, wide and long,

one thousand times more
blue than the morning star,

and vulnerable, like a late
October Rose of Sharon

blossom, minutes before
fall’s first killing frost;

hold the picture close, as
it is your life, our lives.

I was there the day the sun
was a ****** embryo & you
finally awoke under sick blue
                                                mist.  

Do you recall when Nell’s femur
fractured  and she cried the way a cow
bawls  when it is realized the calf will be
                                  someone’s veal dinner.  

Do you think of these times
or has a lardy mealworm crawled within
your nasal cavity & inched into your brain
                                             to erase memories?

Gathering atop our 100 year old
dogwood, blackbirds beckon you daily
to return  to your home  of devastating
                                                              trauma.

I was never the type
of child that obeyed
much  of anything;
not even the many
times  I was told
not to stare into
the evening sun
when I felt
alone.

Morning Sunlight keens like a mother
cries for her dying child & leaves
abandon their trees

while fall presumes winter
will glower like black
ice

hard from
preceding
months,

where the promise
of spring seems
unattainable.

Remember when we buried a stray
dog under the old church bell
in your backyard?  You said

the dog belonged to the *******
mechanic  south of the school
& his mom set the animal

loose because she was jealous;
it did not make sense
then, it does, today.

I cup a Pall Mall, it is 10:30 p.m.,
December & Montana
frigid.

The store’s back window is unlocked,
I take white bread, ham
& mustard.

Hunker curbside, make sandwiches
& eat, I am less

hungry, cold
& 14-years
old.

One dozen migratory Black-and-white Warblers lay
like fallen piano keys on the sidewalk in front
of a 14-story glass constructed building;
I watched as the janitor swept
them into the street.

On their third date,  Sue forgot
her diaphragm; the infant died at birth.  

Second child was touched,
she & the boy moved to town.

Dave got the house, Chrysler
& an unfinished chicken coop.