Another Conversation About Birds
Clouds interfere with eloquence as we share stories of all the birds we could not save. We are seated on opposite sofas, tearing apart the silent, squelching skin of grilled chicken breast, and what is arresting isn’t broken beaks, oil-slicked plumes, little pink bodies half-consumed by little black ants, or the fallen trees out back, a chorus of soundless sleeping,… Read more →
July
your mother’s mother passed this year / you told yours she couldn’t die / bought a potted miniature rose plant for her / for the kitchen table / he sheds his leaves / the flowers won’t open / you better understand why so many have been walking aimlessly / not unlike plastic bags in wind / but now at the… Read more →
the mourning customs of elephants
mother told me about the baby elephant in the Chinese zoo who was rejected by his mother and cried for the next five hours. animal-well of childhood. an animal of grief. I’m O negative, I told her, the universal donor. I’ll need a shot on the 28th week and another one after. to this she warned me about the body,… Read more →
Those Who Give Birth to Goats
Only one out of ten people born in a year of the Goat finds happiness (十羊九不全) ~ Chinese folk saying Some would drown theirs as soon as they were born. Luck won’t come with age, they’d say, and death in water proved far easier than milk. Some would cut theirs out early to change the animal while others would stop… Read more →
Helicon Cracking
This cadence makes me crave rain, the past-ripe grapeshot of a grandstanding, ill-bred downpour, ignited by lightning, drowning me in a blast of bursting coins. I’m sick of this metro- sexual drizzle, low-salt spa sheen sweet-talking my skin, christening me a member of nothing, just one… Read more →
Bad things
Bad things / find you when you do not listen like the little green and black mushrooms my mother told me would grow / in the fertile valleys between my toes and beneath my genitals after every shower / or bath if I failed to towel them dry, or the stories of wild dogs that would gnaw at my thighs… Read more →
Hunt and Peck
The semi’s aerial knocks a rising thrush back down to roadside shrubs it startled from. You hit the brakes on impulse, pull over, ply the green for breath, not half- knowing what you’re looking for where grasses lean like shadows from the earth. Soon it’s lusher than the balance of the best life left to you. Scratched up by your… Read more →
Pain: For Christina
You said how could we know our wild and happy youth could end ankle deep in the dingy snow of an endless winter. As if we sat on adjoining bar-stools in some low dive drinking Jack Daniels and missing the cigarettes we relinquished, fossils of misspent hours. It was dark then, the lake, invisible beyond the windows, holding the weather… Read more →
Mr. Frigaard
The Pioneer Press calls him slain barkeeper. The Star Tribune says he leaned out the window of his car door in the dark of a winter morning and it caught him in the throat. Start with basic shapes, and shade. My high school drawing teacher was shot by a boy he never met. He drew with thick strokes, dark and… Read more →