THE WORKING Industrial Ohio, 1985 White and black kids shuffle through the reduced-lunch line. Their mothers and fathers stand in the rain to apply for the same jobs. In kindergarten, I refused to accept a cookie from a classmate because of the color of her skin. Like me, she lived next to the railyard. Our mothers and fathers waited in the rain to apply for the same jobs. When the trains rattled her windows, mine rattled in rhythm. Because of the color of her skin, she lived next to the railyard. I’m trying to sand down the edges of a jagged life— thinking of that boy who refused to accept a cookie from his classmate. In front of a mirror, I trace the lines of my grandfather’s face, I’m sanding down the edges of a jagged life. How do you continue to love the ones who taught you to hate? In front of a mirror, I work to erase the lines of my grandfather’s face. I want to get down to the micro, to the singular, to nose touching nose. How do you continue to love the ones who taught you to hate? “Son, your inheritance is the busted-out mouths of abandoned factories.” I’m getting down to the micro, to the singular, to nose touching nose. We are blood, brain, and bone—we are we—we are ours. We’ve inherited the busted-out mouths of abandoned factories. We shuffle toward the future in the reduced-lunch line. We are blood, brain, and bone—we are we—we are ours. It’s time we train in rhythm, time we rattle some windows.

YELLOW I’m wearing my yellow robe, drinking coffee out of a yellow mug that has a rooster on it. When I take coffee into my mouth, I hold off from swallowing and let my tongue believe it’s taking a luxurious bath. Traffic swooshes down the street. People are busy being busy. For hours, I’ve been planning a trip to the end of the driveway to pick up the newspaper. Ravens bicker with each other out in the yard. The cats circle my chair, beg to be let out to murder. Each day we inch our way toward death. One day, without knowing it, we buy the clothes we’ll be buried in. We smile for a camera that snaps the shot that’ll be used for our obituary. I’ll probably die in this robe, but until then I’m going to eat some waffles that come in a box that’s also yellow. Often, when children draw the sun, they’ll either use a yellow or orange crayon. The older, more advanced children will use both. In kindergarten, there was this kid who drew his suns in big, blood-red circles. The teacher once asked him why he chose red for his suns, and he said, “This is how I see it. This is how it is in my world.”

LONG-DISTANT LOVIN’ BLUES My dad met Bing Crosby on a beach in California. My mother was born in the same town as Rosemary Clooney. We’d watch White Christmas religiously, sometimes in summer. Even when jazz was still a mystery, I longed to be the lost grandson of Louis Armstrong despite my pale complexion. I owe the first flurry of notes I heard from Bird’s saxophone to a Clint Eastwood movie. My passion for poetry didn’t come from reading Dickinson or Frost, but birthed from flatted fifths that swung me towards the Beats and the rhythms of Langston Hughes and to the Mingus and Bud Powell poems of William Matthews. So, believe this: I’m a Coltrane solo that can barely contain myself when you step off that Amtrak train, and when it’s time for you to hop back on again, I’m those cold-night melodies Sonny Rollins played on that empty bridge.

RIPPING A CHARLES SIMIC POEM OUT OF THE NEW YORKER The one about the insomniac fortune-teller huffing down snowy streets, professing premonitions to the headless mannequins in the tombstone-storefronts. I’ve been roaming the bookstore for hours. The saleslady in a hand-knit sweater (a blinking red bulb of reindeer nose over her right breast) eyes me from the register, sweeping her tongue over her teeth—a primitive gesture that says, “I know what you’re up to, Buster.” Subscription cards trail behind me into the self-help section as surely as bloody footprints lead to the executioner’s favorite hotdog stand in Simic’s poem. The doll in the fourth stanza has sold her hard-luck story about how mice built a nest in her head, and a sliver of moonlight reveals a snout emerging from one of her eye sockets. I want to save that doll, so I stealthily pull that page away from the others like digging a tunnel through a dungeon wall. The magazine drops like the last brick holding back sunlight. I tuck the poem into my jacket and turn toward the electronic doors. The saleslady cries out like a guard from a tower—the red light on her chest flashing gunfire. The doors slide open to the woman standing in fresh snow. She grabs my hand. Eager to read.

O COME ALL YE FAITHFUL Midnight Mass: “Give peace to your neighbors,” commands the priest. I always end up shaking hands with the guy who wipes his hand across his nose, so I dive down under the pew. I think I’m alone, but from two rows back, I see an old couple slither on their bellies, heading my way. “We’re trying to cheat death,” says the old man who smells of boiled cabbage. To kill time, we play a few hands of Pinochle, and by the third round, I look up from my crummy cards to see half the congregation under the pews, each with their own reason. “I hope those choir ladies haven’t quit their day jobs,” mutters a man in a Santa Claus hat. “I caught an altar boy staring at my chest,” says a woman in a low-cut V-neck. Then a guy tanked up on eggnog begins to belt out Christmas carols. Soon we’re all singing face down on the floor, our arms flung across each other’s backs. We roll from side-to-side to simulate a collective swaying, and I feel like we belong to one big, happy family. I don’t even care who has what on their hands.

SNOW ANGELS Each night they stare into the sky and wonder why even with wings they can never get off the ground. Good reason for their creator to take three steps, cock his head and disown his gift to the world. Abandonment: a likely origin of anyone’s lack of faith. And faith: precisely what's needed to soar in the purple abyss of winter. We step out into our lives like sun slicing between buildings and perform this one angelic act that melts from our consciousness. We return to our houses to accomplish something important, leaving behind the ones who don't know any better, who see the wings as open arms, snow as flesh, and are willing to lie back down.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING BLUES She’s savvy and slender. Her mama says she’s sassy. Her papa says she’s a sip of wine. Her preacher proclaims she’s bathtub hooch making all the praying men go blind. She’s the subject of every hush and hiss spewing from pursed lips dribbling over countertops, bars, and bone-China tea sets. Blue-haired-horn-rimmed-glasses gab on about her seven children and the six or seven fathers that go along with them. The cops have tried to link her to three murders, and every burned-out house has her name written in its ashes. Does she believe in God? Whom does she love? The town folk know of course, Jeremiah Earl, her brother, who went dull after he was kicked in the noggin by a horse. Way back when they were children, she ass-whipped every boy who called her brother something less than human. Now she works two jobs waiting tables so he won’t end up locked up in some mental institution. Each beau she brings home tries to convince her to have her brother committed. Each mac she drags back ends up sideswiped by a skillet. And tonight, like every night’s a good night to go on living. It’s good weather for a low-cut summer dress and cowgirl boots cut from red leather. It’s a fine time to shove a lime in a bottle of Corona under a porch light with the town’s new tow truck driver. She knows the brightness a bit of loneliness can inspire. The moon’s nothing but dust and rocks, but it’s still luminous when he leans in to kiss her. She slides one hand up the heat of his thigh. The other behind her back, fists a knife.

IT NEVER ENTERED MY MIND I didn’t know the words or if there were words. Miles Davis’ 1954 version being the first I heard, just a kid living in New England woods at the end of the 20th century, with jazz as exotic and adventurous as Mongolia, Tangier, or Everest. I stocked shelves at the grocery store and walked a two-lane night highway to get home, while the perfect timing of song metronomed its way into my teenage loneliness smack-dab in knee-high winter. Horace Silver rolled arpeggios, clouds drifted across a white moon. Art Blakey brush-tapped cymbals, wind-whoosh through leafless oaks. Davis’ three-note phrases, the few and far in-between streetlights. Once I found a dead raccoon, side of the road and because of a guardrail and steep embankment sliding into marsh, the semis rumbling and blaring, I had no choice but to step over its mouth twist-frozen in agony, its one forearm raised as if requesting my hand, and for weeks the melody of its body unraveled until it became an unrecognizable tune. Were there kits waiting for its return or were no creatures sleepless without it? All these years I’ve carried that life. I don’t know the words of if there are words to this kinship I’ve composed, but know its haunting key and like Miles’ trumpet solo I hum it note for note when I need company.

QUILLS Today a man pressed a pillow over his 7-month-old son’s face, then strangled the baby’s mother (who was also his 16-year-old daughter). He called his mother, confessed, then drove out into the woods and shot himself in the cab of his pickup. A porcupine waddles through a field not far from my house. I’ve never fired a round at anything not glass or tin, but the summer after my mother loaded me on a plane to go live with my father, I spent nailing earthworms to 2x4s leaned along the backyard fence. Thwacks echoed off the shed as morning haze ghosted through surrounding pines. The worms writhed as I pierced their skin— blood and shit smeared the boards. The crucified bodies dried and curled under the sun my parents both shared. The pain we receive, the little it takes to give it tenfold. I won’t measure evil out of units of illness and despair, but while the porcupine munches on clover, I’ll rest on a stone wall, allow the sun to burn my neck red, my hands finally at peace in my lap.

SITTING AT A PICNIC TABLE AT THE QUABBIN RESERVOIR Muddy bird prints on the pine-board top. I want them to belong to eagles or hawks, but convinced they’re of duller feathers. I’m unschooled in avian tracks, but read that the Chinese alphabet was inspired by fowl feet in snow. There’s a rustling behind a boulder and from behind appears a ruffed grouse. It clucks, pecks at the ground. Shaped like a football awaiting kickoff, it struts my way on three-pronged toes that match the impressions on the picnic table. I zoom-lensed skyward, scoped autumn canopy for falcon, vulture, other birds of prey and here in reddish and copper plumage, the thing I tried to find in a raptor’s soar, hops next to me on the bench and stares up with one brown eye.

SELECTED HAIKU april morning rain a finch with red plumage bursts from the porch eaves thunder even the ravens listen spring rain he’s told no one he’s going blind july dawn a flock of geese rise off the still lake her hand swims across my back sturgeon moon rippling stream a crow hops from rock to rock winter shadows rabbit tracks in the snow between tombstones a father lets go of his son’s bike geese flying south autumn rain the outside cat finally comes inside raven croak more and more my father's voice flies out of my mouth woodpecker knocks the silence before and after old rolodex flipping through tombstones thunder ends… rust at the bottom of the watering can sparrows flutter in and out of a hemlock one more thing without you

THE KITCHEN SINK Cylinder of white water, bridge connecting silver with silver, the percussive slap into the basin, spiraling down the drain, invisibly rising toward the clouds: cycle, history--back before the parting of the Red Sea, centuries before Noah’s flood, a link to the first mother, her water breaking, spilling humanity across Africa, and now you, here in this kitchen, one hand on your hip, the other holding a glass to your lips, breath fogging the rim, the house silent as 3 a. m., a levee breaks in your mind, and a held-back realization rushes across your internal landscape: the bridge extends to your children, and one day they’ll stand on higher ground as the village of you is washed away, tears flowing down their faces, polished black shoes, wet grass.

ALL THIS LIVING, ALL THIS HURTING Mother, you’ve been gone a year. I still have the screenshot from the last time we zoomed, your eyes dull with cataracts, a medical mask dangling from your right ear, the shirt made for a ten-year-old girl slipping off your shoulders. Mother, are you with Frank, has he settled down, or is he raising hell in Heaven like he did back on Earth and in our hearts? Mother, is he finally happy? Are you happy? Is your father there? Did you confront him, demand he tell you why he did what we all know he did? Does it matter anymore? Mother, is Grandma there, is Aunt Donna, Aunt Rose? Have you started the bed-and-breakfast you guys jawed about over coffee and Marlboros? Do you remember the last day we spent together, September 16, 2019? How I commandeered a wheelchair from the nurses’ station and we sat wheel-to-wheel, watching but not really watching game shows? Do you remember how I wrote out the alphabet on a yellow legal pad, and you’d point to the fat letters with your red nails, painted by the young CNA you smiled wide for every time she’d walk into your room? Mother, do you remember the disease that held your voice captive, that wouldn’t be satisfied ` until it took all of you? Are you allowed to forget all you wish to forget? Do you remember when you spelled out, Do I deserve this? I understood your question, wondering if you drank the Parkinson’s into existence. What did I tell you? A younger, more vindictive me would’ve told you, yes. Are you still worried? I’ve told you, no. Please, stop asking. Does it matter anymore— all that living, all that hurting? All week my apartment’s been inundated with flies, twenty years I’ve lived here without a problem, and now for three days they’ve been flying drunk against my windows, swarming the lightbulb above the stove—three days, I spent killing 106 flies, flushed down the toilet. Mother, did you send them?

INFINITE DENSITY Paul couldn’t understand what was happening to him. Each day he woke up a little shorter. I must be shrinking, Paul thought. He knew this happened to old people, but he was far too young to be an old person. Then the day came when Paul couldn’t see over the kitchen counter or reach doorknobs, not even on his tippy-toes. He’d have nightmares—running endless fields of shag carpet, chased by a brontosaurus-sized mouse. As Paul grew smaller, frustration swelled within his body. “The most tedious disappearing act,” he’d say to his pet water bear. He had become a speck of memory to family and friends. Only his mother would visit him, her eyelashes sweeping a microscope lens the closest she came to touching him. The dwindling increased until Paul reduced to infinite density. Precipitously, he exploded, spreading incalculable atoms throughout the space-time continuum, generating planets, solar systems, galaxies—an entire universe created out of Paul-dust. Amoebas formed, then fish. Then the fish walked out of oceans, and bumbling two-legged creatures hunted monstrous beasts with spears. All owe their existence to Paul. The more advanced species gather to tell tales of his greatness and sing praise. They raise their eyes and hearts toward the nightly tundra and call to him, their shadows gesticulating wildly in campfire light.

BORN IN THE USA We were pumping our fists with Springsteen, chanting the chorus as Reagan galloped the campaign trail, still pretending to be a cowboy, and the old man who lived in the blue house with the white fence lined with rosebushes was handing out mints from a bowl made out of a buffalo skull. Uncle Bob chopped off his thumbs in a metal press on his first day on the job. My father returned to Khe Sahn sleepwalking past our bedrooms, shouting out the names of smoke and moon. He had a woman he loved in Saigon, sang The Boss. Across the bay— Ferris wheel lights and roller coaster screams. Child Services found my grandmother unfit to adopt. An ambulance in front of the blue house with the white fence lined with rosebushes. A white sheet. The bones and feathers of a dead seagull—a ship wreck on a rocky shore lapped by green waves. On their lunch break, my father, my uncles, and both my grandfathers, their names embroidered on their grease-stained shirts, stepped out of the factory and coughed up their paychecks to their wives idling in Regals, Novas, and Gremlins. Out by the gas fires of the refinery. My father’s handlebar mustache terrified me. My brother built me castles out of blankets and chairs, larger than the house that confined them. Taught me how to leap off the couch like Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, how to moonwalk and breakdance. He’d go on to teach me that disappointment’s a carcinogen. My father took cover behind the Lay-Z-boy in his underwear. My grandmother offered a pregnant runaway a place to stay in exchange for her baby. When the plant relocated to Mexico, my father brought home a pink slip heavier than a Huey Hog. The rosebushes became thorny switches. Over ham steaks and mashed potatoes, our parents poured out their divorce. We had to decide who we wanted to live with before leaving the table. I’d go wherever my brother went: that meant Mom. My father took a job out of state. My mother took a boyfriend, who dragged his unemployment into a bar called The Pit, then staggered into our house knocking over houseplants, and I was the one ordered to clean the carpets with the wet/dry vac. We’d sneak out of the house at 3AM to swim in the neighbor’s pool, or ping rocks off hurtling freight trains. The city condemned the blue house with the paint-chipped fence. My mother’s eye, blackened. We slept in parks, better than home. She stood at the sink, sobbed, scrubbed blood-splotches out of her white jacket with a soapy sponge. Wouldn’t press charges. My brother bought a dime bag and a revolver from a guy named Kool-Aid. My mother was crowned a welfare queen, and drove a Cadillac assembled out of political mythology. I smoked my first joint on the roof of a movie theater with my brother and the stars. An after-school ritual: stepping over the passed-out boyfriend to grab a Coke out of the fridge. We spray-painted gang insignias across the boarded-up windows of the blue house with splintered teeth. The boyfriend could whip up one hell of an omelet. We didn’t hate him on Sunday mornings. My mother’s stiches. We swiped a bottle of Mad Dog, drank it while eating peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. My mother stashed bottles of gin in the leather boots my father bought for their last Christmas together. Twice they called me into the principal’s office because a knife fell out of my pocket at recess. We turned abandoned factories into playgrounds, busted out the windows with tornadic rage. Somebody was asking for it, and somebody was going to get it. I overheard a teacher tell my mother, “He’s going to grow up to kill somebody.” Thanks to the Black Panthers, this white boy had free breakfast at school. My brother waited until the boyfriend was drunk on the toilet to burst in swinging a baseball bat. Later that night while taking a bath, I fished out a tooth biting me in the ass. Backhoes and bulldozers devoured the blue house with the collapsing roof. We rewound and played back the catastrophic loss that plumed over Cape Canaveral on our VCRs. The boyfriend slammed a stolen van into a tree. She’d pour me a bowl of Cheerios, pour herself a Scotch. The boyfriend’s dentist kept good records. “I’m sending you to your father.” Son don’t you understand now? Front-page news: firefighters dousing the mangled inferno. Got in a little hometown jam. I stood before a judge, pled guilty to shoplifting Christmas lights, the kind that twinkle.

AIR GUITAR Out of all my instruments, the most prized, the one I allow no one to touch. The color of sunlight and atmosphere, and when tilted the right way, as if you were going to play it like a violin, the faint hint of turquoise. I perform best with the blinds drawn and the lights off: the electric lime of the Pioneer Reverberation Stereo Receiver is enough to keep bare toes from jabbing into table legs, knuckles cracking against doorjambs while windmilling. After work, after I’ve uncorked the bottle, the wine granting my first wish, I slide under the strap and unravel my fingers on Wes Montgomery licks. It’s well past midnight when I staccato through the house, chugging on “Hell’s Bells” as I rock on my heels, balancing on flame-tips. And it’s long after the bars on Pleasant Street have closed, the sidewalks overflowing with feedback and faces bent out of tune that I play along with the song they’re humming, the one about home, and how it’s a quartertone, somewhere between C and C#, and how we remarkably find the right key.

FUNCTIONAL My father won’t read poetry. He taught my brother the ways of paintbrush and canvas, played guitar before I was born but after Nam, lost interest, saw no sense in art. I’d like to think, surviving war, I’d see no better reason to create, proclaim and praise I am here, but what do I know, given my armed conflict with the self? My father once cradled a dying soldier missing everything below his waist, and watched a starving boy convulse after a sergeant handed the child a candy bar— his body no longer understood food. My father pulls shoulder muscles as he masons walls, lays foundations. He cracks knuckles against engine blocks, torqueing wrenches. Because the dead remind him that splinters in his palms are gifts, he builds cabinets, chairs, houses. His life is work, no room for self-indulgence or anything frivolous. But don’t we also live in rooms not constructed out of lumber and stone? Art is an alarm clock. Art is a ladle of beauty lifted to the lips. My father. On the table he planed, sanded, stained— where we’ve sat together after a long time of not sitting together, where we’ve eaten slow—I want him to dance and afterwards, I want him to see the scuffmarks on the pine as affirmations of purpose—of loving the lost with raucous praise, of letting the gone go.