In every American state
county and town

women walk barefoot
on broken glass

looking for an
open door.

Two Snowy Egrets land.

One is lame.

Surrounded by cattails.

The other ascends.

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.

He followed the buck past
the wormwood barn

down the game trail
into and out of

three hundred yards
of multiflora rose

(so thick his jeans
raveled like terrycloth)

to shoot and leave for
dead, walked away.

When all summed her home was
immaculate,  like pearl polished
porcelain and her maple floors
smelled of good soap and wax;
between Sunday lunch  and
dessert, she would stroll
to the bathroom
to throw-up.

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.

Your mediocre dog
does not partake in birthday

parties or attend weddings,
theatrical  events

bar and bat mitzvahs
nor dabble in oil paint,

yet the pooch makes
the most out its twelve

years of life and appears
happy when compared

to the seven billion
humans on earth.

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.

Sometimes I smell your hair
and pretend to lay my
chest against you

like on those nights after
building  a pine  fence
around the yard

of  a Baptist preacher’s
house in Georgia
forty miles

from cold beer and café pie,
and then I remember that
was 20 years ago

before you and me
drove different
highways.

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.

I gather smells from
the garden near
the well
where
every drop drank
will be worth
my toil.

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.

These winter days go one by one
and seldom does much happen;

yesterday my cat murdered and ate
a chickadee on the deck and the blood

and snow mixture left a pattern
similar to what a painting of

Vincent Van Gogh’s severed ear
might look like on fresh linen.

I let the killer inside, she licked
her paws--curled on my lap.

I am  law
in your life;

you can  jump
high and long,

even  grow
wings, but

there is no
escape,

you will
return.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing in this alley to crow
about—backboard and bent hoop
leans against an old refrigerator.

Over at   McMillin’s place
bags of garbage pile atop
a turquoise Chrysler.  

I’d give the family a pick
and shovel   if they bury
their old basset after it dies;

it’ll probably keel,
the first cold day
of 2017.  

My boots like this alley
even if my eyes don’t,
it hasn’t seen

a snowplow this winter
and, why should
it?

Woman with no
shoes and rag

dress, don't jump from the roof
of your three-story
apartment building,

wait until
it's on
fire.

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.

He was a champion boxer
turned alcoholic
who wandered

east and west
on the town’s
railroad tracks

until death;

after his funeral
his wife spent
her days knitting

and thumbing through
newspaper clippings
awaiting her husband’s

return.

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.

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.

Winging on thermals
across river valleys

counting days until
death hones-in;

lead pellets
swallowed,

prey
eaten.

He said his Christmas Eve was good
in his recliner, TV cranked,
drapes closed,

bottle of Nyquil in one hand,
remote control, in the other,

waiting

for NBC News
to end and football
to begin.

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.

She runs from the garden with a tomato worm in her palm
leaving behind a doll, chocolate milk, and banana.

Behind her and thousands of feet above, a green-black
anvil cloud muscles in  from the southwest, close to home;

far from her mind.

Jingle click
keys, hinge
squeak;

step on  five
gallon bucket,
hoist out

window, disappear
Durham Avenue,
walk.

I need to know
if you think of me;

winter is coming
and it often arrives
with unexplainable sorrow.

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.

We  do not have to know the man who  walks
three hours northside to southside  of town
past green bluegrass lawns, over white
picket fences, around chains of
snapping curs and through
vegetable patches to his
home willed him by
his dead mama;

knowing him is not necessary,
helping him is our responsibility.

Red bud, je m'agenouille devant vous,
votre  départ  jusqu'à ce
que les plis s'épanouir.

She sat on the carpet with a bowl of Lucky Charms
on her lap watching ******-Doo when she
swiveled and asked, “Why do I have
a cleft palate?” Before I could
respond she sang,  “Frosted
Lucky Charms, They’re
Magically Delicious,”
and flipped

to the Flintstones.

On our third date you forgot
your diaphragm;
the infant died,

it was best you said,
babies are wormy
cats, always sick.

I  think of you
when women
with high

heeled black boots
walk past and their
***** jut like Scottish hills;

you are gone but I feel you
in my arm crook, still,
as winter’s bird.

Atop a fresh
fall of snow

a blood red
cardinal

awaits
spring.

Hello short darling
I would plow you
like spring earth

but your husband
has only been
dead eight

eight months and I
fear the shiver of
my thighs

would be a cold
cold reminder
of him.

We walked two miles through July wheat fields
that undulated  beneath Sunday morning sun
like golden swans.

The pond was glacier stone smooth, and canopied
by silver maple and swamp oak; willows lined
the  banks.

Miriam unfastened her hair, tossed her blouse
over my shoulders,  kicked her cut-offs
toward the boat’s bow,

and dove.

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.

She dug ***** after
***** of soil until
the hole was

long, and deep enough
to cover Brownie’s tan
and white speckled
body;

I was twelve years
old, and Beverly
fourteen.

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.

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.

I can not find Mae's recipe for Swedish rye bread;
I thought it was taped to the fridge next

to obituaries, and the phone number
of Joon’s Korean restaurant.  She knew

the bread recipe the way one knows the feel
of a lover’s back or a favorite character

of a cherished book.  I seldom think of her,
mostly when I am hungry or cold.  Today

I am both, and it is only September;
what will become of me by December?

You drink sweet coffee early mornings and sweat
pearls down your nape on summer  nights; you
dream of want.

Zinnia’s sit in an amber vase on your kitchen table,
bacon fries in a cast iron skillet;
there is regret.  

I know you, even though
we have never
met.

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.

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.

In a grapefruit box bassinet a squabble
of flesh, side room a four-year-old with
forehead on her brother’s shoulder-he sleeps
an arm around a one-eyed sock monkey;
Pamper on the boy’s ***. TV sounds like
a  goose, telephone jangles, answers
a mama, she say hello Mr., not glad
you called.

I listen as trucks
rumble past

hauling broken
concrete to fill a bog;

the sound tells me to go
to the backyard

to hear songs from  
hummingbird's wings.

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

came due.

No sound for hours,
looked under the sofa
behind two woodstoves,
beneath the sink where only
mama goes; finally, in the cellar
covered in a week of ***** clothes,
                                    
                   ­                         kitty, Bella.

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.