A knot on the middle finger,
formed when just a child
from gripping pencil and writing,
always writing. Here, the body altered
for the first time in an enduring way
that cannot be undone, as it grows
and calcifies over the decades.
Now littered scattershot over this
dusty landscape. A faint blemish
here where I sliced my hand open
cleaning the kitchen knife one night,
a cut under the eye with no history. Or follow the map
to this consequence of imprecise umbilical detachment.
A patch here of bedraggled forest,
dimpled, speckled birthmark.
The ohm that transcends these rough thistles
and cavernous valleys, thundering
their confidences solely, sadly to one another.
I perch on this mountain and wait
to discover a soft and small prick of inspiration.
Vessel
You would like to see a peony in your budvase,
so you consider going out to clip one
from our neighbor’s garden while she is away,
yet you also see it dying quietly in its ewer,
much the same as they do in the gardens.
When you realize that they will all be gone
by the end of May, you change your plans
to rhododendrons, hyacinths, hydrangeas.
We consider what plants will thrive in the shade
of the front yard and the burgeoning sun
in the back. We consider what areas of the yard
are richest or in greatest need. We push our fingers
into the dirt together, tilling and plodding to cultivate
something poignant and perfect. Planning
what to seed and what to pull. Engineering, hoping.
What blossoms will be the result of our architecture?
“Every morning now I wake”
Every morning now I wake
and step into our failure
of a backyard,
to drink my coffee and consider
all things unfinished.
Youth Apocrypha
I think back to my years
that were dedicated to frivolity
and hope that it is not a thing
to be throttled out of my own children.
I seek to fall in step now
behind the smoking teenagers,
not to chide, but to capture
some ephemeral part of my youth
when I sat across from friends at
barroom tables discussing stories
as though they were the only things
that mattered. Which they were.
Which they are. These toppled pieces
that lie today like ice cubes
spilled out of a short glass,
spinning wildly before melting.
Josh Flaccavento
Glen Canyon Dam
Wherever there’s an Indian walking
backwards, she says, there’s rain. Rachel
on the nametag. Navajo. Some of this land
must be hers, somehow.
You’re from Virginia, she says, do you know
West Virginia? The New Gorge River? Their
bridge is like ours, ours is second
only to theirs. New
River Gorge, I say. Yes.
Design and style. We’re all
standing here—spillways
tunnels turbines tracks
for massive gantry crane—because
of design and style, she
tells us. Thin man, Midwestern, plus
wife. British couple, pensioners. Three
German boys, no good
English. Sister. Self. Last
tour of the day.
Please do not take pictures
of security. Do you need that #
in in. ft. mi. lbs?
Volumes. Pressures. Rates of flow in
m/s. Yes, you may
photograph this observation gallery. See
the water pooling in corners floors
on concrete? It is constantly
analyzed, an engineered
leak.
Grass like golf
course, not
orchard. No trees
here. These men
most highly skilled in the world.
Please observe their images. Ask
me any questions you want about
power water Western
space the science
of how this land was
reclaimed the science
of control.
I Sing Now of This
highway, commonplace and
deadly as time. Signs
mark the miles. They are my
companions and we are
gentlemen of the road. Seconds
crushed under the tires. Blood
and fur punctuate its
interminable sentence, the
flat expanse of hours
black yellow stabbed through
with rain and neon. Curves of
unrequited space pull at my eyes
drag hands and arms, entire
bodies. Calamity of place
less
ness, trauma of location
ripped pulled stretched.
Jagged stroke of light exposing
once-dark innards of mountain
range, spikes of valley ridge
scape. I sing its limit
less
ness, eternity of
motion hurtling tumbling over
boneyards ruins bridges, under
cloud-shadows and sundogs.
If I must burn the world to be free
then burn.
We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone
Here’s what’s gonna happen, she
shouts over jukebox country, 1 a.m.
Renegade bar, Beaver, Utah.
Anybody I ain’t servin
is goin home. That’s
fucking
it. I’ve
had
enough. Need me
to walk you to the door?
Old cowboys a few fat
Latinos antagonists
of this one-woman
shift. She’d rather
the table of ladies
in the back, brother
boys with skateboards
balanced by the door
or us, perhaps, two
out-of-town kids, quiet
polite, silent laughter and six
dollar tip. Just
smoke, ghosts
passing through Patty’s
Friday night
leaving without
a trace.
A scrape
One of dozens, almost
indistinguishable at first
glance. A wound
got in fun, a simple
mistake. You
should’ve known better than
slowing stopping braking raw tips of
white fingers versus river current
Rio Grande Algodones after
noon. Now
new cut new scrape new
wound of what
type laceration avulsion
pulled-back flap of flesh hiding
interiors of blood and nervous
the actual finger the stuff of all fingers
can’t fight tides with fingers, not these
picked-over pulled-at peeled plucked the places
of dozens of simple wounds,
mistakes. Indistinct anxiety
made manifest.
Christine Stroud
Grandmother
Damp heat rises from the grass.
I sing your name like conjugating a verb:
dolo, dolore, Dolores
&
nbsp; until you say Shush,
It’s not polite to call
me by my name.
By the wild grape orchard,
in the backyard,
we stretch out in the hammock
strung between two pines.
You read the Nancy comics aloud
from the Sunday Greenville Times,
while my eyes trace the illustrations.
Your fingers, filmed with cornbread
grease, stain the pages.
I squash a chubby bumble bee
in my fist and wipe
the brown smudge into the white
clover creeping through
the grass. I want you to say
I am brave, but you click
your tongue and shake your head.
My Last Spanking
After church, in my great grandma’s dark oak bedroom, Dad helps me change. Arms up he orders and pulls the yellow dress with white lace collar over my head. One quick movement like he’s peeling off a dried scab. He hands me a bright orange pair of shorts. I am seven, and stand in front of grandma’s large mirror with my arms straight out. Long and thin, I pretend I am a little Jesus on the cross. Head tilted to the side. I poke out my white belly and giggle. Dad, look I’m like one of those little starving babies in Africa. He searches my miniature lime green suitcase for a T-shirt. Hon, that’s not nice. I push out my belly farther. But I do. See, little skinny arms and a big fat belly, I say. He stops pushing around my clothes and looks at me in the mirror. I said stop it. But I’m feeling good and strong, stretching my arms as far as the will go, pushing my belly out as hard as I can. Again I tilt my head to the side. Look, now I’m Jesus. I am over his lap before I can back away or say sorry. The sound is dull, dampered by my shorts. My muscles flex, but I don’t cry.
After, Dad leaves the room, his face the color of a cardinal. I stare into the mirror, puff out my belly, clench my fists, whisper African baby.
From Man to Man, 1973
Somewhere in the house
her bulldog-faced father
is angry. Not at her,
not yet, but at her sister
who’s forgotten to wipe
speckles of toast crumbs
from the black and white
checkered counter top.
Her little brother
is sitting cross-legged
in front of the TV,
watching Gunsmoke.
The cowboys shoot Indians
in varying shades of gray.
Her bedroom door is closed.
She stares into the mirror
of her chalk-white vanity,
parts her hair
down the middle, pulls
it into pigtails.
She braids each side into thick
ropes of oiled hemp. The black
hair against her milky face
and white linen shirt
make her think of Dorothy
before she discovers Oz.
Today is September,
she is engaged.
My husband she says over
and over. Quiet then loud,
mouthing the word hus - band
with exaggerated lips. Somewhere
in the house her father
yells at her mother
who is peeling the husks
off pale ears of corn.
She can’t hear her mother’s reply.
But the girl in the room
doesn’t care. She’s leaving soon
with a man, her husband.
It’s not because he drives
a little orange motorcycle,
or has butter colored hair, longer than hers.
It has nothing to do with the burning
red zits along his jawline
that he fingers like braille,
each pimple pulsing,
ready to explode.
It’s because he is a hurricane
that will breeze out of this town.
Just like her mother says,
He’s going places.
From Man to Man, 2009
In the cream colored carpet,
asphalt-granite counter tops,
a house with no sounds,
she applies the thick
Darkest Dark Brown
to her coarse white roots.
The chemical smell singes
her nose hair, eyes swell.
She stares in the bathroom
mirror, large over the pearly
his-and-her sinks.
Her husband is at work.
His cell phone is off,
always gone someplace.
A husband with a saggy,
pale stomach. His hair fine
like thread, gray as ash. She waits.
Thirty minutes for the dye,
two hours until her husband
comes home. She stares
in the bathroom mirror
and whispers thirty-six
years. Somewhere
in the house, there is a photo
of a boy with butter colored
hair, cut shorter than hers,
in a black tuxedo and white
cake cream smeared on his face.
Somewhere in the house
there is a photo of her
in a wedding dress,
staring straight into the lens.
I Kiss Someone Else at the Party
From my desk I hear liquid dripping to the hard wood floor, steady and deliberate like a leaky faucet. The cat jumps off the bed as I scream, no—goddammit! You come upstairs as I’m yanking off the sheets, she pissed on the bed, I say. You shake your head; let me get the baking soda. The pee leaves the white mattress looking like a smoker’s tooth. We sprinkle the Arm and Hammer over the stain. As the powder dries, it cakes and crumbles, but the stain is still there. I mix bleach and water in a spray bottle and douse the splotch. Every few hours I spray more and by night time the stain is almost gone. You rub my back, good job, you can hardly tell. Later that night neither of us can sleep. We both stare at the ceiling and listen to the fan whirl on low. I whisper, I think I can still smell it. In the darkness I see your head nod up and down, yeah me too.
Abraham Moore
Inadvertent Landscape
Two voices,
two black rectangles of voice,
one little lung, carpet.
They’re changing the garbage in the lobby
behind him. I disagree.
The word doesn’t do that.
There are Places Where We are Unwelcome
My scapula twitched and burned like a cymbal
the night she put her tongue in my ear.
The room had charisma, small appliances, nice drapes.
I forget the times she called me an asshole
And it begins to rain disfigured little faces outside.
I worry the forecast, paltry glasswares, stomach pumps,
I worry ticket stubs.
My lip cracks and bleeds on my beer can.
The black walnut tree sheds all over the lawn.
Everyone at the party smells like turpentine.
Later it feels like we’re sleeping but when I close my eyes
I wake up and all I can think of is pale skin,
scissors, a playful thorn inside a quiet word,
the bird outside, one squawk of possession,
of unknowing narcissism, of breath.
Armed Only With Our Sense of Degradation as Human Beings
Our hands hold the vase that holds the train together for just
this moment before the train shatters and the clasp
is no longer a human clasp. It’s a beast, or the outline of a person,
or the idea of a self as a shattered line of a wrecking train.
I feel like the vagrant who left the stolen bicycle on the tracks
to derail the train whil
e I pissed into the screaming brush.
We Want to Have Been
Cormorant,
this word of you, afterthought of stolen
second-hand clothing, this soft public address
concerns my lungs. You’re kinked neck in flight
spills the ghosts of Shane’s open, soft hand,
of empty Fairbanks bottles, Stephanie’s
blind eye, all over the couch. I keep slipping on them.
I wish they loved us. They used to be us:
dissolved into stretched-out moments, eating salads.
We lean on the barrel of nights’ waiting tantrums.
We feel, want to become, or to have been the ghosts,
to scavenge some before-man groan of waking
under the sad little fruit trees.
Horizon
the small way the power lines divide the white-orange trees
the small way of a car alarm— distant guard-rail thin, and mad
near the overpass— a woman pulling hard on her
own hair in the breeze-pocket of a train station
Chris Haug
Brueghel’s Bouquet
1603
Deep hues of brown hold explosions
of scarlet, pink, and eerie blue with force
enough to keep them eternally blooming,
their leaves green now for four hundred years;
meanwhile, four envious pale-white tulips struggle
to fully open, trying to remember the strange
taste of air back when they were just small
dark buds fracturing the frost-covered loam.
Behold, his Enemies Low at his Feet
There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar: easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife . . .
—Joseph Conrad
Defender of junior executives and over-forty
gym-rats, you range wide over our jungled
streets, patrolling our every storefront ensuring
that both bears and bulls stay safely in their dens.
Slayer of the numbskulled, you’ve mastered splitting
the hairs of every hairline, no matter how humble,
for while one hand keepeth both the fire and flood
at bay, the other gooseth the discontented housewife
even as her dough-brained husband boils
in a hot-tub of aged bourbon, benevolently
sacrificing himself to the primitives who would have
inevitably run off with both their fortunes
had you not been here to save them.