--I CARRY YOU EVERYWHERE WITH ME

                                                         Strain

Your face is a Rorschach test and there’s no way to know what your eyebrows want. 

So we dine on oxygen.  The table explodes in balls of black and red fire, then regenerates.  This happens over and over.

The children are off playing somewhere or maybe they’ve moved out, maybe they’ve grown that old.

Our dead honeymoon cat won’t stop staring. The walls have even bigger ears stuffed up with canopies.

We used to play Gin Rummy in the tub. We used to keep a solitary kiss intact for a whole week.  We used to We used to We used to.

If I ask, you will blame it on Shakespeare or Hitler again? Your friend who killed himself on the freeway wasn’t fooling around and I guess you’re not either. Or maybe he was more than a friend.

                                             My Father’s Legacy

         When they call your name, the angels shudder and go up in a gaseous plume of tar smoke that flounces off the ceiling, rocking the attic, the locked chest, the ancient lock cracking, lid jarred open, all of your sins slipping out for once, ghosts of a dozen dead girls, none older than twelve, strangled and buried in a quarry where no one found them until now.