On Being a Trucker
All the stuff I don’t have to say. How lucky I am. Like “I drive a truck of cheap perfume.” Of canned tomatoes, of cleaning supplies, I’m not sure it matters, or maybe it does in the trucking world: I drive tires vs. I drive milk. Oil vs. Seafood. Furniture. Toilets. A truck of cars....
Swerve
I’m sorry about that time I ran over a piece of wood in the road. A pound of marijuana in the trunk and a faulty brake light—any minute the cops might have pulled us over, so you were edgy already, and then I ran over that piece of stray lumber without even slowing down. Thunk,...
This Is Not To Say
So many feelings fit between two heartbeats So many objects can be held in our two hands Don’t be surprised we can’t describe the world And just address things tenderly by name. -Zbigniew Herbert This was supposed to be about the dirt that flies up in puffs between bare feet when the bees are buzzing...
Duck, North Carolina
Once, walking, I found on the sand not a butterflied clam but a small tooth. We have been coming here so long that we can point out where the road used to end, though we differ: some say the fish hut, others the rental shack. Pretty soon there will be a baby, eating great fistfuls...
Cathy or Katy
The rain fell through bus headlights, getting us ready for the big lie. We spent the weekend in New York City, my heart beating up through my neck in the gold glow and enormous doors of the Mayflower Hotel. Eric and I, when the urge to crawl out of myself toward her became no longer...
You Like It Don’t You, You Like It Hard and Cold
and sweet with surprises inside well let me introduce you to the state line dairy where the cherries in the sherbet are harvested from virgins and the girls filling the cones all have boyfriends in vietnam and the thing in the jar on the counter is a pickled pig’s foot let me introduce you to...
Why
What good are you? What do you do? – Dr. Seuss Because language is all we have. Because today my son is eight years old. Because songs run over, over, over and spiral out on their own axis. Because I cannot sing. Because almost nearly half through last century and however much is left to...
Pop Art
In nine years I have been graced with three children and here is what I have learned about them. They are engines of incalculable joy and agonizing despair. They are comedy machines. Their language is their own and the order of their new halting words has never been heard before in the whole history of...
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