tks here are two more,


bar talk


to Cathy Merris-McNealy


sun setting in the breeze
kids need supper
wife in bed with cramps
taxes due by midnight.
the phone rang
the wife took it.
it was mom.
i could hear the Jackals laughing again
and my bones knew it was my sister.

the one who looked like an Indian princess in Manhattan
before she returned to small town Illinois.
the one whose back broke
from stocking bars and working kitchens
in two different states for 20 years.
whose doc finally said nothing could be done,
just disability and dope.
whose tongue two weeks before
was so dope thick that
when she called me honey
i cried.
that one
had O.D.

and now was in withdrawal.
in the town of her birth
in the town of her mother's birth.
the town of her grandmother’s birth and death
in the town where her grand father
drank in sweating silent red brick streets and
danced other women in full moon snow still nights
while the Jackals of the Whorehouse of Death
circled laughing.
and now his granddaughter,
my sister ,
is looking in their eyes
to see if she wants their laughter
or her life.






this is for the one that you left in the morning
a long time ago: warm hands


for Marilyn
and what I was too scared to let happen



i forgot the way i described her skull
"..a baby with night attached."
and how I warmed my hands
on her breasts
braless beneath her sweater on
those winter mornings.
i forgot how when she would laugh ‘nd lean into me
my spine shuddered
poem to flesh.

i forgot how early that summer
she wrote that she was late.
a week later another came
everything was fine
and she was moving in with…

i forgot after a fall in Kobe i came home for Christmas,
there was another from her
she was leaving him
there was a number,
i never called.



i forgot her until yesterday when my boy told me
that a girl told another girl who told another girl who told him that the first girl liked him and what the heck should he do,
run or stay.
my hands
shuddered cold and i
muttered" warm your hands" at a light on
Telegraph and 51st.
he looked at me like I had lost it.
and you know
he was right.