are all lies. I left my love in the ER and slid into predawn dark, faintly aware that I passed through the afterlife of a Pottawattami village noted on the Treaty of Detroit. Evergreen climbs from the Rouge through the city until it grays in a welter of interstates and stripmalls. But it begins where an old road once stretched… Read more →
In real life, I put my head in a machine. How is this brain different from all other brains? My transient, shifting butterfly-shape of a landscape in its final stage – possibly shrinking, almost definitely frayed — but already on the downswing. Wired into the surface, the metallic clatter of pulsing attachments, steel stimulation, determines levels of insult. Pay the… Read more →
If only your mother had been a waterfall or a strawberry bush, a flock of albatross with sun woven into their veins. If only your father cried, even once, or saw a mug of coffee perched in moonlight and exclaimed that’s beautiful enough to paint. Haven’t you realized? Everything you did not inherit went to someone else. No matter what… Read more →
First, make a bird. Very well. Its wings gently grasp black. Does it sing to you? Is it trapped or freed by your hands? Why has it not flown away? Dorsa together, curl the left, fingers forward, a rabbit appears. Will it survive the winter? Can it elude the slender outline of a coyote’s jaw? Shape a heart, does its… Read more →
as winter arrives delicate seeds falling through crimson-stained fingers
As a ghost, I explore concrete — cities mostly where I blend with smoke, and smoke cigarettes (nothing to lose; I am ephemeral). Selfies only other ghosts can see — I take them of myself with marble statues, terrazzo floors, porcelain vases. I envy the edges of things: corners of buildings, facial features, drops of rain. Every chance I get,… Read more →
hundreds the size of nailheads spawn in what shallows our banks contain darklets in mudclouds clay my brother stirs in fistfuls to sieve through between spaces of fingers here we are stillwater disturbances the canoe slicing into canebrakes the mobile of lures caught twisted in the limbs of trees we shade in we the waterbugs we the herons who stand… Read more →
A pregnant cat licking its fuzzy belly in a warm drizzle -Richard Wright In my shaking hand: a pee-soaked strip of plastic. At my feet, bare and cold on the February floor: a cat. We look at each other. I’m pregnant, I announce. I’m thirsty, she replies without words, turn on the faucet so I can drink. At the sound… Read more →
left alone to the no stranger of myself I lie in a furrow with my tongue dressed in shouts taken by strangeness my backwards love for birdcalls I whistle back to to cows chewing cud I eat mud for field mice the screech owls that snatch them up my love unmatched for paperbacks soaked in roadside puddles my love for… Read more →
These are the days of wonder when dusk runs a thousand miles to meet me waking up in the morning; red and blue clouds pile up behind the mango tree where I hid during the war to escape the barrage of bullets cascading down our roof, where bats gathered in the hot air, stealing the flowers and our breath and… Read more →