Poetry

The Landscape Does Not Regrow

For E. On days where my body turns brittle, flakes off in your hands thin as bread-shell, can you still hold it? When the wall in our new house resembles the one I stared down while I was drilled years ago and I disappear, retreat into this lonely grotto of skull, even then? Cold night air pinpricks my joints, and… Read more →

Don’t bite the hook

Extraordinary things can flourish in pondwater, in my stagnation where festering scum glows green. Coursing the perimeter my feet catch dust half-heartedly getting somewhere implausible and balled up. When there’s nowhere else to deflect the loss of clean water and no avoiding the neon algae spreading from the shore then my self-inquiry is self-elision is the risk of not saying… Read more →

This City is a Pig Farm

This city is a pig farm but you are young, so you don’t mind;   to you, it’s merely dirty work, and dirty work makes for   an interesting story, and being gay, in your mind, is being a body made   of interesting stories. You don’t know any better, yet,   but this city is a pig farm, filled… Read more →

Thirty Years Gone

I don’t know who that was with river rocks for eyes, that head of antlers and the grass of fallow stream banks loose behind his ears. He never breathed the exhaust of this actual life or drove home before sunset, preferring mayflies at dusk or scribbling symbols by car light on the shoulders of gravel roads. I return there once… Read more →

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 →