Welcome to the Good Life Review

He is describing luggage he needs for their travel, and his hand gestures are terse and caring at the same time. I’ve always been attracted to his hands. They slice through the air and form several rectangular shapes, and then it starts to rain.

The boy stood between his parents. His father was a heavy, mounding rain cloud of the plains. His mother, the cold dark soil of the Midwest.

– Good Friday

Tried to recall my first ciggie again. Had it been Pearl? The best answer was somehow simultaneously yes and no. When would she have even tried? Did she even smoke? Had she been in the Jeep with me and Charlie? Yeah, front passenger.

– Roger and Flight 8124

One day, you led me to a shadowy corner of the narthex where tilty circular stairs mounted the air. We tiptoed the steps, like a series of half-tones, to the pipes in the loft.

– The Heart and Other Organs

I had gone in to get her, confronted by dazed residents sitting like barnacles on ripped red vinyl chairs in a hot, smoke-filled lobby that burned my eyes and turned my stomach.

– Nocturnal Lagophthalmos

Fear, misery, love, desire for vengeance are emotions strong enough to worm their way into the bowels of a house, coil into the walls, lurk in the long dim corridor shadows, fester at the back of musty cupboards and bedroom dresser drawers…

– The Truth About My Old Haunts

At first, they removed the dirt with naked hands, the rocks hurt them, as if they were fighting them to avoid uncovering the hell of a son, a daughter stretching out their hand waiting for the fingers, the palm freed from solitude and abandonment.

– You Shall Be the Earth

                        …In a month,
my father will be sent by ship into battle,

unaware of the utter darkness there,
till his unit enters Buchenwald.

– War Time, 1942

Just a face on a shirtless body,
a body so much older than the last time I saw it.
Mom texts
            Alcohol?
but I know the difference in wreckage,
how the body puffs when pickled, eats itself
when sleep or food is forgotten.

– Mugshot

On a Sabbath afternoon, we might watch men filling buckets
with slick, gray fish from the even grayer river

– I Remember Good Days

Always her voice from the trenches,
rifle rising, taking aim:

 

    life isn’t easy, you know  
    good isn’t good enough
    I’m the only one can tell you this

– Love Poem for My Mother

the eyes, mustaches, and cheekbones
for years settling on your dreams like dew.
You didn’t want to say Mass alone.

– Mass in Quarantine

I have taught you all you need to know. 
A grosbeak skittered across the path,

 

but my dog was not distracted.
His eyes shone with new understanding.

– The Last Trick