Demons in the Diner

Winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize
Ashland Poetry Press

Demons in the Diner includes poems on classical themes (the art of Hiroshige, Henry Moore, Coleridge, Robert Burns, et al), current events such as war, homage to African-American greats W.E.B. Du Bois and the Delany sisters, the Holocaust, and personal relationships.

	Protest March Where should I take it, my sign, now that I have painted it on the back of an old valentine? In the cities they are heading for embassies. At air fields they are burning the flag, but I have sailed here, to the sacred island of Delos where even the winds turned round, have come to face the white bones, the columns lying like broken bombers, the ambitious stones. I face the archaic holy lions, the busts and rain-beaten faces of tyrants who thought their time was forever. Now they are reading, and I, when I hold up my sign, must at last understand that only the trembling red heart can bring peace in our time, silence again over the stones, that we may hear the small creatures singing. ____________________		Demons in the Diner Bowtie, mustache, slant smile-- all such men are my father, including or especially Adolf Hitler with his fedora laid on the counter. A waitress in a yellow uniform setting a spoon next to the hat and a mug full of coffee, her dark eyes confessing torture, flirting with even her own son or some monster who has stopped by in the night-- all such women are my mother and the diner my dream museum, my house of horrors. _________________