I.
Box fans and mowers drone below,
distant traffic murmurs through summer’s heat.
Memory presses: teeth and old thunder.
Regret. Punishment. Hope. Repeat.

My ears ring with histories,
sometimes cicadas, sometimes sermons,
sometimes her humming, barefoot by the creek,
sometimes the sting of my father’s belt.

Sunlight slants through bloated magnolia leaves,
thick as tongues,
slick with old rain.
It stains the walls with a color like yolk,
like aging joy.

II.
I wake in moonlight,
before the rumble.
Step barefoot onto concrete
still warm from the last sun.

The sky is full of stubborn stars,
hung from the last funeral.
I watch. I wait.
No birds yet. No breeze.
I stay.

I tell myself this is peace.
But the silence knows better.

~
alone and an imposter,
deep in syndrome.

she absorbs the frost of seasonal ghosts
and hopeless feelings
of death and darkness.

she only shows one side of her every time.
she calls a random number
from a bar in the middle of the night,
seeking to confess
or find solace in the voice of a stranger.

but any stranger might just happen to be
a lie detector.

still she lays bare all the duplicity
and fragmentation of self:

prescription bottles with two different names,
elaborate façades in Los Angeles
and in New York,
so complicated she creates
something she calls the lie box.

inside her purse there's a collection
of file cards. "I tell so many lies," she says.
"I have to write them down and keep them
in a box so I can keep them straight."

alone she waits for either
sweet apricity or identikit:
each a memento of her faces.
~

cracked asphalt of the modern realm

and court jester Gus pushes a shopping cart
he borrowed from the A&P to collect

bottles and cans
for a pence, perhaps a schilling.

the alley cat he cared for was named Maggie
and Gus slept with Maggie
in a kind person's village cellar.

it was rumored that Sir Tommy R.
shot a flaming arrow
into Gus's wooden leg.

young knaves
called Gus a *** knowing he'd chase them,
wooden leg and all,
and he was swift.

some threw insults, some threw eggs.
the village was a ballroom
fit for lords
in search of a court jester.

Gus the ***. I saw him

i saw him limping through the rain.
my heart was thin.
I threw him apathy, feigned sadness.


his heart still glows in my sorrows garden.

nobile misfit. all Gus sought was a smile, bread,
and a kind word.

Truth bends to the eye that sees it.
Some truths stand fixed like stars in the sky,
But many shimmer like reflections in water-
Shifting with the angle ,
dancing with the light