August Kleinzahler

You were dozing over Uttar Pradesh well after the shadows of Annapurna swept across the big plane’s starboard wing,

dreaming a peevish little dream of Stinky Phil, your playground tormentor from fifty years before, his red earmuffs

and curious cigar voice vivid as the tapioca you used to gag on at the end of Thursday lunch, when the captain’s serene, patriarchal voice

suggested...

The soppressata fée outside of Califano’s with the swept back ’do and blood on her smock grabs a quick smoke on the sidewalk, tosses it in the gutter then sucks back her lips till they smack, getting her lipstick right....

An apocalyptic crack spreads like thunder over sintered gorges and alkali flats. The junco is knocked sideways then drops as if shot onto a granite bed, turning slowly mahogany there – wild peony. Somewhere in the bleached sky and cirrus a Phantom is at play, singeing cattle, lifting shingles off farmhouse roofs. An enormous ball of phosphorus bounds across the Carson Sink.

–...

Snow is falling along the Boulevard and its little cemeteries hugged by transmission shops and on the stone bear in the park and the WWI monument, making a crust on the soldier with his chinstrap and bayonet It’s blowing in from the west over the low hills and meadowlands swirling past the giant cracking stills that flare all night along the Turnpike It is with a terrible deliberateness...

Under the floorboards Shadow and Smoke bark through these windy summer nights, always at queer intervals. Something’s got up their noses or call and response with a distant yard. All summer long awakened from dreams by barks, remembering each of them through, shabby kinescopes. The guys upstairs come fetch them in the morning and disappear till night, always leaving the light on in the...