Old calico with gummy kidneys and knotted joints, fur no longer smoothable, like a carpet that someone spilled paint on, never the same. The vet tech inserted
the port in one leg, and she meowed her last protest. I thought of my mother, who as she aged closer and closer to her final, feeble 93, said, “We treat
our old dogs and cats better than we treat ourselves at the end.” I held Madeline, named wittily, I thought, given a cat’s propensity for sleep, for Keats’s young woman
who dreams of her lover. When the tech started the pink drip, Miss M looked in my eyes, knowing; I like to think it was a look of thanks. The tech asked if I wanted time
alone with her, but I didn’t want to feel her warmth ebb away; instead, I imagined her waking somewhere, running off with her young and supple tom.…
Dawn’s heart beat for the first time in nearly a decade. Why am I here? She takes in the expressions of surprise on the nurse’s face. The woman hurriedly pages the doctor. The patient feels enormous pain when lifting her hand to touch her face. It takes an effort. She feels gauze surrounding her face. She remembers that day. She hears the laughter and shouts and views the feet of rage which stomps her face.
It began uneventfully and a nudge from a friend turned into senseless violence. She tried to ward off the blows but there were too many of them. She struck two girls and one ripped out her braids before she fell. Their furious faces, especially the one she thought was her friend and believed had her back.…
When we discovered oil in our backyard bubbling beneath a suspicious strawberry that produced fruits redolent of racetracks and truck stops the nice man from ExxonMobil who showed up unannounced assured us our financial worries had ended and the fun could begin
Handing us a handsome business card he promised to retire our mortgage provide a substantial monthly stipend and gift us an immodest bonus check in exchange for the exclusive right to install a bobbing derrick in the garden where the tomato vines normally flourished
Agreeing to this felicitous arrangement would not only benefit our banking he assured us but additionally and this was the really neat aspect of the deal we’d be doing our small part to guarantee America’s energy independence from foreigners who hate our freedom
Explaining your great good luck to someone who doesn’t have it can be tricky so we told him it sounded wonderful and very generous and we’d really like to help win whichever of our nation’s ongoing wars was most important but unbelievably providentially we like to think just last week the wife and I discovered a vein of gold while digging in the potato patch and after praying on it and paying off some bills we’d made a pact with our Lord and Savior to convert the excavation site into a community swimming pool – MK PUNKY
Note: This poem is excerpted from MK’s collection The Year of When: 365 Poems Beginning with the Same Word.…
One day, a small tiger mosquito crawled onto my mother’s skin, possibly from the bully bay, the muhly grass, or just dropped in from the night sky and pierced her, taking her blood in tiny droplets and exchanging it for Yellow Fever.
It’s said that the fever started in East Africa somewhere and passed from land to sea, sea to land, person to person. Eventually, one mosquito in a long lineage of short-lived ancestry reached St. Augustine, Florida, and passed on this small dark gift to my mother.
March 26, 1929
The Florida sun pulled itself over the horizon and caromed off the gaps in the wind-bounced palm fronds in the front yard. I can’t remember the last time I spent all night out. I put one hand on the doorframe and the culmination of the night’s adventures peeled tocsin through the front of my head to the back of my ears.…
When he was born, his mother cried for two days, and his father got desperately drunk. His grandmother—who wore many shawls, had seen many things, and whose passions time had ground to dust—regarded the newborn’s odd bony protuberance with nonchalance. If God had put a knob on her new grandson’s back, he must have done so for a reason.
For those two days, the grandmother sat close to the fire—for her shawls were thin—stirring the embers and rocking the baby. On the third day, she slapped and punched her drunken son until he wept—not an easy task since in his state he felt little physical pain—and plied her daughter-in-law with brandy until she was drunk—not a difficult task since all that crying had left her dehydrated and thirsty. …
I know nothing but the spray of buckwheat, highway perfume which permeates tar oases we cross each day. Our tired shoes trace contrails of an F-150 that has already blitzed through eternal savannah.
I know nothing but adobe homes and SNAP. Bricks laid in a pattern I can’t quite discern, etched into mountains like long-forgotten cuneiform, waiting for some denim-clad explorer to bring its Rosetta Stone.
Until then, we settle, ephemeral & unpronounceable, waiting upon this assembly of fissure and dust for a voice evicted—its stolen breath now only a road apparition: Tilework Americana.
A blink of neon lights the path from Mississippi deltas to concrete jungles, from checkered walls of late-night diners to the daytime glow of Sunday papers, headlines flickering into a lithographic coma as we turn to our pharmaceutical dreams.…
