At a sandwich shop in San Francisco I asked to be called Travis. I walked by the Natural History Museum where a cave of Neolithic men were learning to play the spoons for all the hairy babes preening fistfuls of knotted hair. A bear of smoke crawls over their backs, shaped like the Rottweiler outside my window in the morning. Police sirens float over, and he harmonizes. ah-roo-roo-roo but low as if he wants me to hear them too
April raindrops tap on the tin roof as if a giant is standing outside pouring a bag of rice onto the bus. Doc only vaguely hears them over the rumbling engine, but he can see as they slide down the thin horizontal windows across the aisle. After today, his life will never be the same. But that’s not why he’s here, so he makes a point not to dwell on it.
Conversations hum in a quiet monotone, mixing with the rattling of chains and scraping of metal on metal. A couple voices, however, have distinguished themselves above the murmuring over the past six hours, one of which belongs to a man in a cage near the front who boasts of the two people he shot and killed.… ...continue reading
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.… ...continue reading
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.… ...continue reading
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.… ...continue reading
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.… ...continue reading
