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The Fence Posts

Visiting my hometown of Daruvar, Croatia, in 1986, I was taken aback when a friend told me, “Go back to the States! We’ll have a war here. Serbs have lists of all the Croatian households. At night they will slit our throats.” I thought he was crazy. Now I think I was crazy not to see the warning signs.

This Life, This Word Unsaid

The American Dream

A tricycle, a mobile home, a company man

Cowards

Dad brought me forward, a hand gently on my shoulder, face to face with the boy I didn’t want to fight; whatever he said, we understood that we had to. Maybe there was some feeling of a code being invoked, a tradition being followed.

My Study On Stay-Puts

You can do your studies on us migratory types all you want. My sister Rose came home from school last year saying that’s what you stay-puts call us. I told her you’re probably the same guys yelling White trash bastards go home when we drive through Salem. She says, no, you wouldn’t yell at us.

Selected Poems

The Wreck

Shirley Moody got sick in our house that night from sunburn, and that night — two nights after my ninth birthday — my daddy had a little too much whiskey and drove the Austin-Healey through the fence down on the canal.

Talk

My father brought Jake’s body home from Colorado in a record-breaking blizzard.

Luzianne

It’s funny how the absence of someone who wasn’t ever really there feels. It’s not like a hurt, it’s more like a bruise you don’t notice till you bump it. Then it stings. But only for a second, only for as long as it takes me to put my mind on happier things.

Drowning

At the age of two, I saw the ocean for the first time. I threw wide my short arms and ran shouting, straight into the Pacific, where an undertow reached out to embrace me. I still remember the upside-down whirlpool of warmth, like the womb out of which I’d so recently swum.