#AmericanWriters
The new grass rising in the hills, the cows loitering in the morning… a dozen or more old browns hidden in the shadows of the cottonwoods beside the streambed. I go higher
In Havana in 1948 I ate fried dog believing it was Peking duck. Lat… in Tampa I bunked with an insane… who kept a .38 Smith and Wesson i… In the same room were twins, oiler…
The ship that took my mother to E… Eighty-three years ago was named “… She remembers trying to eat a bana… without first peeling it and seein… in the hands of a young Scot, a se…
The gates are chained, the barbed-… An iron authority against the snow… And this grey monument to common s… Resists the weather. Fears of idl… Of protest, men in league, and of…
Los Angeles hums a little tune— trucks down the coast road for Monday Market
Last night, again, I dreamed my children were back at home, small boys huddled in their separa… and I went from one to the other listening to their breathing —regu…
Numb, stiff, broken by no sleep, I keep night watch. Looking for signs to quiet fear, I creep closer to his bed and hear his breath come and go, holding
Look, the eucalyptus, the Atlas p… the yellowing ash, all the trees are gone, and I was older than all of them. I am older than the m… than the stars that fill my plate,
Hungry and cold, I stood in a doo… on Delancey Street in 1946 as the rain came down. The worst p… is not from a bad movie. I’d read… USA and thought, “Before the nig…
Everyone loves a story. Let’s beg… We can fill it with careful rooms… with things—tables, chairs,… closed to hide tiny beds where chi… or big drawers that yawn open to r…
The little girl won’t eat her sand… she lifts the bun and looks in, bu… coated with relish is always there… Her mother says, “Do it for mothe… Milk and relish and a hard bun tha…
If the shoe fell from the other fo… who would hear? If the door opened onto a pure darkness and it was no dream? If your life ended the way a book ends
My brother comes home from work and climbs the stairs to our room. I can hear the bed groan and his s… one by one. You can have it, he sa… The moonlight streams in the windo…
When he gets off work at Packard,… outside a diner on Grand Boulevar… a bit depressed, and smelling the… on his own breath, he kisses her c… on her left cheek. Early April, a…
Since I don’t know who will be re… this or even if it will be read, I… invent someone on the other end of eternity, a distant cousin labo… under the same faint stars I labor…