give me a Sunday highway when moms and pops are in some church praying or busy in suburban backyard bbqs when the wolves are cruising beach parking lots or downtown streets when favourite sons are posing at tennis courts and highend malls it’s then that I let the beast run free no one on that
they kneel at their pews before the statue of Our Lady in veneration their fingers maneuvering rosary beads reciting the prescribed prayers contemplating the sacred mysteries of each decade they used to be many their voices rising and falling a marian chorus of prayers for the living all sinners waiting for their hour they are
i kept my mother’s kitchen table eight chairs long, solid wood large enough to hold a feast of plates and all of us to sit around sharing food and lives she made bread upon it, sometimes twice a week and Sicilian sweets none of us could duplicate even with her recipes found handwritten in her
we never danced on the beach only walked leaving moonlit footprints eyes open for cherry topped cruisers hunting curfew criminals from weekend teenaged assignations cruising the shadows of canatara silent among the others hearts and breath tripbeating as we spoke words “that had just the right amount of letters. just the right sound”* stolen from
Wendy, the sunset is bathing the stragglers on the beach into orange coloured silhouettes the bend’s summer’s influx of beach bodies empty out onto bars and beer joints their partying continues from sunrise to moonset most of them frat boys and highschoolers searing their summer forever in memory with too much sun, alcohol and one
1 now in this afternoon as river fog creeps dragging it’s thickness licking us in heavy air in this time that is not time we amenities shall speak of what went unspoken shall see and place the invisible signs . . . . . . afternoon: the whistle summoned its great silence the omnipresent shroud
Motown playing “I need your Lovin” from your girlfriend’s ipad on a soft summer afternoon sneaking wine in paper cups lake waves breaking on the beach as we sit and hum along playing name that tune from the playlist of songs that now are oldies but we were young when they were new the soft
Stars stud the black sky where the snow tree grows and I in my white bones housed among branches. Slender tree fingers, why am I here in yellow forsythia again, running among daisies. Now I am a leaf between the sky and the ravine. I will call on the wind Oh, Bright Spirit, open these
Even in the sting and sear of these shrapnel days, the gardens insist on their green rebellions, stubborn fists of tulips pushed through the lingering skin of frost and body parts, the lilacs by the Dnipro gushing violet beside grandmothers planting potatoes among the sandbags, hands wizened by survival, each seed an argument with the
My hummingbird does not arrive, it materializes, like an answer, suddenly not there and then is, an invention on emerald fly wheels, a drone-whirring of liquid engines suspended among the blooms on threads of wind and magic. What force each morning commands him to my garden? What bottle green and flaring fuse holds him in
