Another trinket in the display window
of my father’s shoe repair shop, I am
an unkempt preschooler in bell bottoms
and T-shirt sitting among upside down
armadillo shells stuffed with buckles,
rows of handmade leather sandals,
puck-shaped tins of shoe polish ... [more]
Into frost’s
harrowed rows—
frozen earth, where plows
have passed these many years,
coaxing winter wheat to rise,
the earthbound toil for bread ... [more]
Last week at the local Goodwill, I found an old AIWA stereo that plays compact discs and cassette tapes. It was equipped with a speaker and a red and black wire that one would have to manually attach the speaker to the outlet in the back of the stereo. The speaker box was large, the size of a small filing cabinet, but probably weighed less than three pounds. I inspected the tag where someone had scribbled ten dollars in a blue sharpie. I inquired from one of the workers if the stereo worked. She smiled strangely—insultingly—and said yes. I smiled back, thinking sold..... [more]
Some people were yelling that it was bourgeois to care if the
kitchen floor pulled at your socks. Yeah, and what was wrong
with shit on the side of the toilet? Shit’s natural ... [more]
Our desks arranged a two-row-deep horseshoe shape for John O’Connor’s striding through the mix of upperclassmen in Latin III, translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Our teacher mocked and extolled the gods’ and goddesses’ exuberant jealousies, their efforts at crushing human hearts and shaping the world. He reveled in the amusement, for it had nothing to do with him or with us, not really. It was subject matter. It was the matter ... [more]
Dew settles on the chain-link fence and freezes,
lozenges of winter that hang for days. Two boys gather
handfuls in their mitts, suck a few—each its own small winter ... [more]