Category: Poetry

As the sun crosses the meridian dividing the house, / the day slows down, and the living room becomes whiter. […]

Aunt Flo had a daughter She was a drug addict Aunt Flo had leukemia Her husband left her Aunt Flo had a party invited everyone she knew gave everyone gifts told everyone how much she loved them Aunt Flo said she was going on a trip She was found hanged     Vincent J. Tomeo… Continue reading Aunt Flo’s Goodbye

Ahead of the crowd, I settle into a choice window seat. This former school bus won’t roll from Times Square deep into New Jersey until every seat is paid for. I eye all those boarding. They are, to quote Sly Stone, everyday people. More than a few women board, lugging shopping bags and little kids,… Continue reading The Mexican

The colleagues would celebrate closing a case with the special hidden bottle of honey-tinted brandy, the very finest, extremely old. All the way down it would burn: grapes of France, oak of Germany, and your eyes, in the end, meeting mine.     Ruth Holzer’s poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Poet Lore,… Continue reading Uralt

Face: heart-shaped; matter-of-fact, diffident Eyes: bespectacled;  hiding, searching Arms: thin;  hands nervous with low energy Legs:  woolly socks to just below the knee;               bare calves and thighs to just below the hemline Body:  white, warm, slightly moist Panties:  hidden, flimsy;  lightly fragrant with perfume or scent from nature Pinafore:  thrown on to cascade, lightly… Continue reading Doucette At Work In The Bookstore

“You’d better not write a poem about this,” my daughter warns, only half-joking.  She’s just visited her cousin in prison, a young man she’s never been really close to but whom she’s known all his life. “Where’s my pen?” I joke back, but I wonder what she must think of me, a guy who exploits… Continue reading Keeping Confidences

Interstate traffic veers smoothly right as some State road remnant, a pale-laned highway swatch, trails left through median weeds competing with cracked asphalt, pebbles, and ragged  pea-gravel, fades to little but sparse struggling chicory and a vague dry & pale spiked green horizon, populated by Monarchs and locusts flitting aimlessly toward oncoming diesel grilles, or,… Continue reading Ghost Road

Here, the triangular couplings of the cars twist, veer off inclines into levees, freight-doors open, chickens half- fluttering, feathers settling the dust: the caboose man running, jumping the debris, rubbing his on red eyes.

used to follow me when I went to physical therapy running housewife errands and in Montana a highway patrol car trailed us when we drove back to Spokane when my husband and I returned from a family visit to his stepmother’s house in Wyoming before she had her accident and passed on just like the… Continue reading Island Police