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Selected Poems

Cities With Spanish Names

It had all been very proper. There had been letters between Luz’s home in Guadalajara, and Los Angeles, where Diego’s family had lived for some years. Diego’s parents wanted him to marry a decent mexicana, not a wild American girl with no morals, and Luz was the daughter of old family friends. Diego traveled to Guadalajara to marry her, and she came to live with him in Los Angeles.

Decline Of The Lawrence Welk Empire

I get a postcard from a place called Paradise, and on the back is a note from an old friend that says, “Free lunch under the coconut trees.” It is the season of disco and dope smoking, of long, ramshackle cars built by cocaine addicts in Michigan, of oil embargoes and promiscuity and awful haircuts, and I look around at the girls and boys in their platform shoes and bell bottoms and everybody divorced or pregnant or stoned or listening to disco and scratching their VD sores, and I know the world is coming to an end, so I call United Airlines and order a one-way ticket to Paradise.

Keys

Reading the rosary, giving a milagro to celebrate, dipping boxer shorts in a freezing lake

Getting Caught

Two wedding crashers, three strikes, four hubcaps

One Violent Crime

I had gone no more than a few steps when I felt a hard punch in my back followed instantly by the unforgettable sensation of skin and muscle tissue parting. Silva had stabbed me about six inches above my waist, just beneath my rib cage.

My Death

Eight Days In Brooklyn

“ ‘Black rage’ — it’s a new defense for the Long Island Killer, sort of like an insanity plea,” my dad says as he drives us toward Brooklyn from La Guardia Airport. I have just arrived with my daughter, Rose, from northern Idaho for our annual week-long visit and I’m anxious for news.

July 1995

Where The Wind Comes Sweeping

House Speaker Newt Gingrich insists there’s no connection between reactionary rhetoric and reactionary violence.

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