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The Vomitorium

We were standing at the edge of the blacktop at Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Grade School, as far away from the recess monitor as we could get. It was 1978, and we were in eighth grade — though Ralph would have been in high school already if he hadn’t failed both the third and the fifth grades.

Notes For Future Tenants

My boyfriend, Tony, tells me he remembers seeing Muddy Waters sitting in a chair on Maxwell Street in Chicago playing the blues. He says it was a Sunday morning and Muddy was playing alone. Now the Maxwell Street market shines with the silver circles of cleaned hubcaps, hanging for sale.

Tree-Jumper

He told me about his own first “transgression”: fondling a seven-year-old girl; how one thing led to another (he was mostly vague about his crimes) until he finally got caught. How his greatest fear was that he would someday molest his own children, though he didn’t have any yet. The other inmates at Coxsackie had pinned a label on him: “tree-jumper,” a guy who stalks children and hides in bushes or behind trees.

Selected Poems

Clayton

My friend Clayton died just before Christmas. He threw himself from the forty-fourth floor of the Marriott Hotel. Clayton Brooks was a poet, an actor, a taxi driver, a playwright, a drug addict, and a lover of humanity.

Glorious Failure

Bad news is supposed to travel fast, but this news took nearly three months to get from a snowcapped mountain in Vermont to my office in North Carolina. It finally arrived on a beautiful spring afternoon, eyes downcast, dragging its heels.

The Cantor’s Birthday

Before they kissed, they cried. With her head against his shoulder, they ended the war. With his lips brushing her eyelids, they ended the war. With her fingers mapping the lines of his face, they ended the war. With his knees tucked into the hollow of her knees, they ended the war.

Home Birth

Afterward, no one present recalled my pausing. It was brief, practically instantaneous, but it was one of those moments that open vertically, perpendicular to time, and encompass worlds.

Nudity

Randy’s sky room, nudist camps, a sparkling circle of mist

Crossing In Fog