he said & disappeared into the crowd – “Nuts,” she thought but later in the day when the big brown dog chased her down the alley & a man waited with a van & . . . & by the time they got to Tucson the last she remembered was the radio & a voice that said the border was closed & he encouraging her to dance ‘in the light of the moon’ as it was full & when he took her in his arms & whirled her across the desert floor she gave herself to impulse & married him on the spot – for that night at least – & that’s what he’d tell his friends in Harry’s Bar until Sunday when she stormed the door & dazzled them with her footwork & backed him flailing into a night of no return when the lights went out & he’d never be seen again.
There Are Mothers
wheeling buggies over hot coals, messengers high on blue smoke & tabloids greasing the gears of genocide. There’s a father further down the boulevard dancing belly to belly with a boy in black who offers a chocolate kiss & hisses in his one good ear; his tongue a torch to light the way to heaven’s gate. There’s a mother practiced in cures for an ailing head but nothing for a heart awash in dread who worships at the door where a mouth delivers a basket of lies. This is no time to question authority, shutter your windows or leave in the dark. & yet, there are mothers huddled with children in the woods who barter themselves for a second chance. They’re tough & they’re wanton . . . between screams & whispers, they have & they will abide.
Haunted
There are men & women who cannot see the sun rise without suffering a crippling pain between their eyes . . . those who fear the ticking of a clock.
*
An out-of-work carpenter in Sicily sets himself on fire on the steps of the Palermo Municipal Courthouse. His note reads: I am ruined.
Dimitris Papadopoulos, a recently laid-off insurance exec in Athens Greece, shoots dead his two kids, his wife & himself.
*
Where there’s a garden in full flower, some see only the falling petals – a viper where a young kid pirouettes & prances.
*
Andreu Font, a Spanish geology professor who lost his job when his college was forced to close, hangs himself from a mid-town lamp post.
In Toledo Ohio, in front of a glass factory where he once worked, Robert Hall props the muzzle of a 12-gauge under his chin & pulls the trigger.
*
Where the mountains meet the sea, there are those who dread the untamable rage of the catapulting surf – the tranquility of the receding waves.
*
On May 25, 2011, Fay Yee calls her neighbor to ask her to look after her Collie pup then leaps to her death from the Golden Gate Bridge.
*
There are men & women who cannot see the sun rise without suffering a crippling pain between their eyes . . .