Teens

my hands are still my hands
like my grandfather’s hands
are his hands and they
are on the window
attached…

It was July. I must have been sixteen or seventeen,
And proud to be chosen for a grown man’s work,
Hollowing…

The caregiver calls to tell me about mother,
but I know she hasn’t slept. The security videos
of her restless…

Once, in winter, I was blessed
      by lightning, the plane
sudden struck—the boom

of it, the cabin lit …

As if sweet olives blossomed again after the first Bailu frost, shadows
Talk, tiger tail grass talks,…

The end of summer
and our jalapeño plant

is wilting, its stem brittle
as the heat peels

away from us,
though…

It is morning. Remember that.
It is morning and the house is quiet,
so quiet that I can, for the moment…

If we’re put here long enough, someone’s bound to learn something. The sweep of the second hand erases…

Again, an ousted child or orphan happens onto a den.
It happens then. Invitation by faun or badger to…

Forgive my trespass, I mistook for work a crown
of raspberries and custard. Thank you, tartlet, thank…

And still one looks to the tree to paraphrase the sky, arbiter of wind and sun. The hills with their…

December. In Odesa,
power stations, shelled.
Your father’s friend
shivers in his apartment
crammed with …

The redolence of rose and new road.
The attar of grass, recently cut.
The fish-whiff of anchovy.
The spinning…

I’m not the first man to lose his father
slowly, not the first to wonder
when I walk in the room if the…

For the sake of argument, let’s say
the day my father outlawed all contact
between backhand and face, …

Firemen cut the car open like a cake but when
they reached through the windshield to pull me out
they …

I walk down a dim hall, and appreciate the coruscating layer of wax on the floor(how I could sleep there…