Poetry

Where you are going
you cannot take
your things leave
in this locker the rivets
at the corners of your blue
jeans

There are so many things a body
can collect into itself
milk of a mother in a cup of coffee

Two Cooper’s hawks on an electric pole, facing
opposite directions. The larger bird hopped up to the 

top as I neared. I stood there until my eyes hurt.
Our eyes must be on loan. When we die, we 

have mercy nothing
prepared my body to lose its
brother nothing prepares a grown man to fall

The tops of the buildings were shorn. So I walked
down Market Street to see if I could find them. 

The fog tried to take my head off. I was so scared on
some parts of Market that I stayed a few feet behind 

In the Sonoran Desert, my brother hands me a revolver. In place of tenderness
he tells me to kill a woodpecker. It’s injured, on its back like a sunbather
thrashing in a gravel bed.

If you like me will you make me better
look at your sandbox of a screen how my
bones have ground fine like my mother’s if
I promise

Overhead the Kentucky sky was clear and went on forever. I don’t really remember how we parted or where I went after, only that he wanted to stay awhile, that at some point he hugged me, tucked a cig behind his ear, and started down toward...

A friend from one of those Shithole places tells me 
she’s worried. Am I sick? Depressed? I’ve lost 
my mischievous smile. She’s listened to my laments: 

I drive out Old Frankfort Pike past the ditch 
by the creek where you pulled off on New Year’s Day 
to pick from the mud that Jack Russell 
with swollen nipples and bring her back to the farm.