Hanging the Family Photographs
Master this concept: Nothing is ever really parallel. And this one: It doesn’t matter. No matter what “it” is. How about: Your children aren’t your children. And this: There’s no single word for adult children in any language. Consider: Gaps/oversights/ insufficient oversight. Remember: The pictures will never be straight. And: No one thinks to write who’s who on the backs.
I Want to Show the World its Poison
(1) Yesterday in our town forty seven pedestrians observed symptoms of seasonal depression sometime between sunup and inevitable sundown. Of them, twelve coped with a half-panic whose queasy threshold is hard to tell of, and let’s not forget the new hires, a couple mangled on a conveyor belt. It’s a small town mind you, and the poison being out of… Read more →
Host Community
The agreement takes place between the host—a location— and a business that leaves mercury and lead, perhaps, the agreement preceding the construction of a factory. A set sum and a guess of what will happen when the plant opens are accepted. One host, my old home, agreed to “no visible plumes” but got three. On a clear day— or not—the… Read more →
Coming Home After the Shooting at Brown
1.I know I am home when everything is painted an industrial aqua bluelike we rose up from submersion and with the first breath plottedhighways and overpasses—God’s hefty arteries. When the blue hits meI know I can relax, put my left foot up on the seat, for it’s only thirty-fiveminutes till I reach the bridge, which is essentially twenty-five, whichmay as… Read more →
Paradise
Sequined gowns fit when I was young, their sparkles stitched from TV static. Sheets draped the skin when TV went off for the night or the set broke. TV does not go off ever anymore. But I can’t watch it or the night’s middle pressed against my own. The tree in the window makes me turn to Paradise. That’s the… Read more →
Encore
i carry my mirror self like the gift it is — fragile in its limbs, soft beyond reparation, beyond repair. beneath his oblong face, pack of honed molars suppressing a psalm of hope. on the hill of his desires sits a boy at the bed of a river, tossing pebbles across, bobbing as bubbles ripple the surface of the water…. Read more →
Interpellation
consisting of phrases found in closed captions, Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, and “Depersonalization: Standing in the Spaces Between Recognition and Interpellation” by Orna Guralnik, PsyD, & Daphne Simeon, MD aligned with the social order, so thoroughly mastered, [men continue indistinct]. a three-dimensional person becomes a mannerism; to carve out a new sovereignty [soft fingerpicking] in which we breathe… Read more →
butterfly house
wear white. bring cash. give up the sticky sidewalk for a swallowtail to kiss your fingertip with its feet. ignore the caterpillar who’s attached its body to the glass. don’t ask how long, or where, or whether the monarch will ever make it home. I wanted to wear bugs in my hair like jewels and emerge in pursuit of a… Read more →
The Lurking Variable
Warm and thick, like wine left swirling in its glass, you think of Guangzhou’s breath when winter arrives in New York. There, you pour Hudson’s whiskey and name it the same vintages. You step into the room near Harlem, swallow the light that tastes of uptown rain and diesel. Your breath clouds the pane: another bottle finished, another Pacific ocean,… Read more →