We are walking among the sycamores

you know where we are

you with your hair parted sharply on the side

me with my dragon shooting water from its mouth

I thought school was a pain, but for some kids, like Rich Utz, it must have been torment. Utz was a mountainous child, with a skull as big as a buffalo’s, abundant blonde curls, and an unaccountably cheerful expression. He even smiled while he spoke.

I saw her in the shadows of the bar, peeking out from behind a column, watching us, the friends she’d left a moment earlier, “to freshen up,” she might have said, or was it to go outside for a smoke, or maybe to say hi to someone who’d just entered, someone the rest of us didn’t know?

The check had long since come, and he had paid it. And the restaurant now was empty but for the two of them and the last remaining waiters eyeing them angrily from the darkened far end of the room, all the other tables cleaned, the chairs upside down on the tables, and the floor mopped…

You were still too little for the new bicycle I’d gotten you, but too big for the tricycle you still liked to ride, and so while the big bike stood unused in the driveway, you rode the tricycle around the cul-de-sac, knees banging on the handlebars, feet clumsily pedaling, happy to be too big for once for anything…

Dublin, 1974

The car bomb had exploded not far from Trinity only a few days earlier, and the city was still largely on lockdown. Even the churches near the bomb sites were mostly empty.

Secrets require space, as in the hidden drawers of a writing desk my grandfather built out of ash for his lover, who also happened to be his sister-in-law, my father’s (and mother’s by marriage) Tante Hilde. A small, light-colored desk with a clean, simple design. A writing desk.

The sky has been curdling for days—


the slow-bloom of pale tumors
drifting against the oily lid of slate grey.


Smoke tusks coil from burning leaf piles

Again this summer, lugging

behind them their red wagons stacked

with paint cans, they are coming.

A man’s life isn’t worth mule piss

in those levee and lumber camps,

skillet-black bears, panthers,

cottonmouths as fat as a dead man’s arm,

I am Christ’s overwrought Y chromosome

And Yggdrasil’s sickly branch,

The ouroboros teller.

I am the Ash.

my obedient body becomes wild again

obeisant to salt and plastic water bottles

obese cauldron of a boy whose pupils become planets

obstetrician who midwifes serotonin

I am 15. It is the summer

of 1982. I’m working illegally

at the Sonic Drive-In.

Weatherford, Oklahoma.

On the way to your studio, a Cooper’s hawk

dove in front of me. It left clutching yellow leaves

and not a single sparrow. I knew then,

somehow, that I would never take my own life.

maybe there’s duct tape

in his pocket a butterfly


purple & knifed this a spoonful

of eleven p.m.

on a stranger’s lap

you’re on a school bus full of ripped-up

papers and a girl with a bleeding nose.

someone hit her and wants to do the same

to you. there’s a cowlicked boy standing

Artwork by Erica Harney

Nothing so obvious as a gumball,
a coin. Instead, the cap

to the chapstick, or, somehow,
the moon: Lips parted, tongue

A plastic bag of cherries I'd forgotten

has molded in the fridge from my neglect,

and the sight brings me to their taste again

and the day I found them at the market.

The mind too has its autumns—the dead hours

that, windblown, gather into canceled years.

Here the failures, of nerve or desire,

accrue, cling with the cold interest of snow.

Her friends leave her with the liquor bill. They’re off to catch a play she has already seen and did not like. They didn’t want to hear her review. (Sentimental claptrap.)