Charles Chaim Wax Poems

Mary McCue leaned into the shopping cart
for a romance novel
and the fat on her arms jiggled
with forty years of loneliness
...

I strode to the Pier in Coney Island
on Christmas day. Eleven degrees
and with a gale off the vast Atlantic
the temperature zipped
...

suddenly eighty-four
this woman I have watched for fifty years
her back low now
since the old man
...

Kogaku Roshi had just finished his opening Teisho,
a speech given to spur students on
when Trentino leaped from his full lotus position,
pranced to Kogaku Roshi’s mat,
...

Daisey’s father
leaped into a D train
when she was 28
now at 34
...

When AIDS
couldn’t be fixed
all the people
suffering from it
...

in the afternoon
the sweetest part of my life
no solutions
life stained
...

in the first wave, ”
declared Peter F
referring to the
killing power of the
...

Following three years without a contract
the union settled
nothing but givebacks
but that’s the way it is these days
...

As I parked the car on East 12th street
a mouse appeared on the outside
of the windshield
a baby, anyway so small
...