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THE GIFTS
They brought him myrrh on a flaming salver and all he could do was say “This is something I would expect from a butcher or a carpenter, and the camera angles would never work, so bring me napalm or punji stakes that we have proven to work.” They brought him ripe oranges and the sweet…
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BAGHDAD VILLANELLE
We enter, the conquering heroes, drive quickly through the city’s core. We leave a crude division in our throes. We expected flowers, not blows of an angry mob, to be adored. We enter, the conquering heroes. An old man sits in a small café, he knows what will come of this, a festering sore. we…
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COLORS
We hunted him as a trophy stag across his fields. We called him red man, color of Ares, gods sacrificed on our altar. His rivers run with his spirit. I am white bereft of color, barren, a glare, a dessert stripped of life. It is I who wears Cain’s mark, plucked from the garden the…
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CARTOGRAPHY
On the map are neatly etched lines drawn by a fine stylus in a skilled hand separating blue from yellow. This soil is cinnamon there tending to mahogany no line, only a post here, one there and a gun emplacement to deter those who cannot see a line writ on water. In the wind the…
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CULINARIA
My repertoire was so much wider then for that is the mis-appreciated burden of youth. My bookshelves groaned under the weight of a couple of hundred cookbooks, tomes focused on the apple, fish, chicken, or on isolated corners of what seemed to me to be an infinitely large world. Azeri food seemed a continent apart…
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ONE OF US? NEVER!
I now live among birds, and they accept me, listen to me endless complaints, and never demand I cease kvetching. I know they speak about me behind my back, but they are kind, and generally do not remind me of my shortcomings, no doubt certain I am all too well aware of my failings, and…
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BROKEN BOW
This poem was recently published in the first issue of a new journal, Punt Volat. You can find it here: https://puntvolatlit.com/issues/winter-2019 Early this afternoon, a Kenworth semi pulling a 53-foot trailer rolled down Nebraska route 92 and entered the limits of Broken Bow. The importance of this event, while not yet obvious, will, I promise,…
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PIQUE
One of these days soon the sun will again get angry, will blow off steam and all manner of signals will get the message loud if not clearly. The sun can get away with it and we accept it, if not willingly but begrudgingly. When we blow off such steam cities melt, and the angry…
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EARLY IN THE SECOND BOOK
She wrapped him carefully in an old blanket and several sections of the Times and put him in the basket with the broken handle she found out behind the Safeway near the culvert that was home until the rains came. She placed him among the weeds and beer bottles, where the river’s smell licked the…
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NAM
He said, “I survived the war, was up to my armpits in water wading through the night through the rice plants that would never bear grain once we called in the orange. I walk through minefields, the noise a deafening silence since the only sound that mattered was the click that shouted death You think…
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an old writer and his words 