A Brief For The Defense

He is in the wood when the rain starts; in the thicket of cedar and oak. The titter and prattle resounds off the creek like the morose laugh...

No traffic today, it’s winter and I am here without you. The sea grey as slate falling away off the continent, inflamed with the high phosph...

He has lied to everyone about his whereabouts. He is marooned at sea or in the desert with a small batch of sour mash whiskey, a sumptuous m...

Come home with me. He folds her hand under his like the surf of Lake Michigan tosses and rolls a stone. Softly eroding her knuckles. Come ho...

A dour pewter morning after a night of dense rain. She goes for a run but her body is not willing; legs like cinder, heart like a drum. She ...

I was talking to myself the other day the way I often do, talking to myself about love. Trying to figure the thing out. How it comes about, ...

Put away the sundries of summer: cover the grill, the pool, the patio swing. Let the worms on deliquescent fruit drink and let the crickets ...

On the far perimeter of his father’s old farm he discovers an old well’s pump and faucet. He is a professor, and the land, agrestal and wild...

Her apartment has a dazzling view; the city coruscates at her feet in the east and to the west is the desert, severely black and empty as de...

I had a moment today where I felt I did not know you at all that you were a stranger to me that if you fell from my life and decomposed like...

She has that pronounced, rounded aboriginal jaw. South American highlands, horse country. The Campo. An equine mouth pushed out, and deep se...

He takes breakfast late on Sundays, alone. It is the end of summer, the summer in which the absence of pain stopped being a surprise and ...

Your room is cluttered with leaves the way a yard is cluttered with books. Some are raked into precipitous piles in corners and under tree...

Summer is senescing into soft spools of shadow. Autumn sweetens the mornings with his hard ambrosia. We are inside late summer, mostly n...

The old Russian poet sits down at a bistro with his muse. New York, of course, sometime late in summer. Sweat seeps through the distended be...

In my dream last night there was a party and you were there. Things had not ended badly. So we laughed. You wore a white dress (which seemed...

It is difficult to believe that as you move through a sultry thick night like this that somewhere, not far off, there is the boy the age you...

Rhythm precedes it all. The solemn purl of water heading home. The thrum rattle of thunder cascading down the manifest plain. A liminal narr...

In that late lovely hour of full lissome light a small boy stands with his brother in the penumbral shade of a cherry tree, looking up. Toge...

(in this section, Luis the student/journalist is in bed with Maria Rosa the city coroner. He is talking about his relationship with his fath...

She parks - he does not drive - and they merge into the flow of people, minnows into a school. The gibbous stadium lights burn against the s...

We are bombing Libya. On the path ahead, two robins are dancing with each other, coquettishly, and now, dancing with me, too. Further ahead,...

The girls are out, showing a little skin. Lunar thighs, pelagic chests, deciduous eyes. All of it that fragile intimate hue. And their slow,...

In my late twenties, I was working two rather monotonous jobs. I fell into a pyrrhic sort of anomie, always exhausted and quick to complain ...

The sky is its thin, sepulchral hue. Clouds slide out of the west like the high hull of a Viking war boat. Her apparition crew composing the...

We have come to a threshold, maybe crossed over. Like gawky newlyweds. We are no longer the people we once thought we were, which is to say,...

AP photo of a protestor in Haiti I cannot see her face, but she is beautiful. Black skinned, muscled taut in fury. I can see her shoulder bl...

The anticipation is often the best of it. The dream drowsy cigarettes on the fire escape over Spanish Harlem. The insomniatic hour at the po...

Right now, I am up with the fallow, pearly morning. Doing the dishes slowly by hand. Listening to dead Delta blues men. Dancing a bit, poorl...

First snow. Nearly dawn. What I wouldn’t do for a cigarette. Or, a grapefruit, halved, drizzled with a pinch, or two, of sugar.

A lovely girl, wrapped like a child in an oversized blanket. She lets it fall open in front, like a tent flap. Ashen skin, the puerile pink ...