Strange Privacies: Poems

An excerpt from Section 3: My Father Dressing Me as Zorro, taken from the poem “Listening to Coltrane on the 4th of July”: Now I’ve lowered a mask over my face The eye-slits don’t fit, and I can’t see. I scent the smoke of his cigarette. I tell him they turned off the electricity, the gas and phone, that neighbors fed us after he left. I’m feeling in the gift box for a toy rapier, which I wave between us. He tells me to stop horsing around: this close, one of us is likely to get hurt.