from AMERICAN CYCLORAMA

from AMERICAN CYCLORAMA

The twilights were violet and seductive. 
All sweet tea and the dark sides of horses.
The women would lie tidy in their beds
and wait for rapture. Latches undone and

cigarette burns on the carpet. A churning
in the belly that grew by increments
each day. Sediment in the bottom of every
wine glass. Broken shards on the patio.

We’d abandon card games and cocktail
hours, curl tight inside the shells harvested
from beach vacations. The children tossed
frogs in the gutters and went hungry. 

Learned to live off small red berries and 
rabbits picked clean in the clearings. 
All wild things growing docile and softening. 
We’d file down their teeth and line them

against the fences like warnings or trophies.
                                             No one knew which.

---

from AMERICAN CYCLORAMA


Daily she passed women, down on all flours 
rooting in the grass. Men hanging, one armed, 
from trees. Children perched on rooftops cooing. 
At the church on first street, there was a gaggle 

of violet hatted ladies who shoved tea sandwiches 
down their throats and spit them out in their hands. 
A dozen high school girls who hovered graceful 
like cranes over the county pool, one leg raised.

Minnows in the water supply, creeping charlie 
wound through windows and around your limbs.  
Mold that crept along the underside of anything 
that sat still too long. Tables, chairs, the base 

of the baby’s rocking horse. Rivers that appeared 
suddenly, cutting through houses in the space next 
to the sofa. The elm tree that erupted overnight 
from a woman’s spine. Her series of grunts and clicks. 

while man next door outside all night 
digging up roses and sniffing the garden fence. 

---

from AMERICAN CYCLORAMA

Sometimes it was quiet. The soft animal
inside her would sidle against her edges.
Would lay its head in her lap. In the streets,
you could trap tiny frogs and quail for dinner. 

Could climb the trees and see for miles
beyond the river. The severed rocks that formed
the coast.  You could wander the hallways of
hospitals and schools and find no one but your 

own reflection in the glass. Classrooms full 
of leaves and empty desks. The books on 
the shelves eaten or burned for fuel.
How they left a pile of ash in the center 

of the room we’d write our names 
on walls with. That is, if we could remember 
them.  Could produce them from the valley 
of our wild and rabid throats.