Gary Fincke: The Book of Numbers
Ten thousand and one, I thought,
Ten thousand and two, and went
Outside, after that fever,
To bounce a ball off the roof
Gary Fincke: The Doctrine of Signatures
my mother’s heart
Winding down while I thought of petals
Red and sugared as a lover’s gift
Gary Fincke: The Chernobyl Swallows
In April, near the anniversary Of catastrophe, barn swallows returned, Flying inside the exclusion zone to Nest in the radioactive ruins. Like disciples, the swaddled scientists Marveled. The work crews, … Continue reading
Gary Fincke: Scattering
From six to ten pounds, our cremains
Will weigh, the visible fragments
White or gray, the largest pieces
Ground to sand-size for discretion
And the ease of our scattering.
Gary Fincke: Naming the Sky
…because my mother
Has died, wonder if he means to show me
Where she is, how one cluster has reformed
To suggest a melodrama of hope.
Gary Fincke: Hanging the Pigs
The silenced crowd pressed forward,
Waiting for those pigs to hang,
Shutting up their Satan tongues.
Gary Fincke: Anniversary
“Gary, just you wait,”
My mother promised me ten thousand times,
And I did until this moment, saying
That I’ve woken, love, to some happiness
Gary Fincke: Headcheese, Liverwurst, a List of Loaves
Our refrigerator
Opened to liverwurst,
Headcheese, a list of loaves:
Luncheon and Luxury
Gary Fincke: A Murder of Crows
Driving home, I see all of them
By the highway, pecking at
Whatever is splayed out and torn
Gary Fincke: After War News
The moon, lately, was a celebrity, full
and a few miles closer than usual, enough
to bring three neighbors outside near midnight.
Gary Fincke: Selflessness
In the animal kingdom, among fish,
one father carries all of the laid eggs
in his mouth, sixty-five day starvation
to make that flexible, deep mouth a womb.
Gary Fincke: The Double Negatives of the Living
I could talk
Two hours past midnight with
My father in the steelworker
Idiom of his city.
