​Free Diapers

We win a lottery, free diapers for a year
but our children are grown, so we try
to refuse the prize. It’s no use. “You 
could sell them on E-Bay,” they tell us,
but we prefer to give them away.
Goodwill won’t take them, though,
and the hospital looks at us suspiciously,
the baby nurse trying to memorize our
features for the cops The women’s 
shelter shoos us away.. Every week 
diapers come in a brown truck with a 
winged child painted on the side. 
Armed with a tiny bow, he smiles
at our suffering. The deliveryman nods 
at us as he hauls packages to our door. 
I offer a tip if he’ll take them back, but 
he smiles sadly and shakes his head. 
He seems kind and mute, with a melancholy 
wisdom born from patience and seeing 
too much. Our rooms overflow with little 
plastic bundles; the trash collectors have
taken to skipping our house. We stand
on street corners, with sandwich boards
that read “Free Diapers,” but drivers
merely glance at us and quickly look away.
Soon our house will disappear. The haggard
ghosts you see wandering the streets at night
will be what remains of us, your neighbors, 
cursed but still human, burdened with flesh and tears.





Carrots


“Yes, I can cure you”, said the wizard 
to the saint,” but you will have to give 
up carrots for sixty years”. 

“Carrots? What harm can carrots do?”
“In this case, they taint the blood.”
 So the saint bowed and accepted

his long abstinence. In the end, though, 
it proved impossible. Without carrots 
there was nothing orange in his life, 

nothing to scrape for soup bubbling 
on the stove. It was like living without 
sunrise, with only darkness or sudden 

blinding light. And so, with the cure 
stopped, the saint grew dim to all eyes. 
His holy passion spilled out onto sand, 

until he was nothing but a pool among 
green-stained rocks, his orange blood 
pouring out among the lily pads and frogs. 





Werewolf Counts His Change


Two quarters, one nearly black 
around the rim, two shiny dimes, 

a sad nickel and twelve pennies, 
copper, gum gray and algae green, 

eighty-seven cents, metallic sweat 
jingling in the pockets of his jeans.  

Kiss it goodbye, a handful of change, 
just something to count out for coffee 

or dump in a gesture of largesse 
into the tip cup or panhandler’s open palm. 

“I hate change,” werewolf growls.  
Without change, they say there is no 

growth, but he knows better, changing, 
changing in his monthly bath of silver 

light, tingling in his groin spreading 
through legs, chest and arms, spilling 

shower of pin pricks to fingers and toes, 
choking language as it forms 

in stretching snout, change thrusting 
raw power up and out into night.​