Brother, you began to leave me early, chose to offer yourself to the ground beneath horses and trains, refused to focus on my face, this world a water too murky to cleanly navigate You leave me every day in small ways, and I imagine your organs must be eroding, your skin the only shoreline I want to visit, and time… Read more →
Running up from the railroad tracks, crossing the bridge, no cars on the avenue except mine. Five in the morning, two wolves, one car, one woman. I drive slowly in the dark, hit my brakes, gray fur fluttering as they run in front of my car, as the wind blows from the south, gives them something mild and invisible to… Read more →
After reading Tracy K. Smith If not a vessel, a purse to hold the necessary scatterings and ticket stubs that show we prefer each other’s company when lights dim and sentiment is projected to the far walls. More sturdy than tissues, comforting than a cough drop. The bandage for paper cuts. If not the… Read more →
for Annie Anchorage we’ve never met But I write to your daughter often & she loves her mother well I imagine your skies are low Your buildings scraping them with ease Your children reaching up their fingertips To poke holes in the firmament Is this how stars are made? Your streets must be sunlit & not warm Exactly but layered—soft… Read more →
Cyprus icon Mary’s puffy crows feet have been crying about the world again, she misled us all. How in the hell did that painter jot her down so fast, before she could get her makeup on like normal? I’ve seen those Hollywood epics with their false street preachers rubbed in bone dust on every damned corner. I’ve seen their ladies… Read more →
Parque Nacional da Tijuca, Alto da Boa Vista, Rio de Janeiro When his father’s eye opens over him waxing him in cool light over the river, even us faithless are stunned. Whatever happens at last, I hope he can escape the old blood staining his robes, the loneliness no one told him was part of being human.
I am a calming cobalt blue. A contradiction. Really, I am a problem solver, a gift from my mother. The ash she’d let grow so long on her cigarette, I thought it would grow legs and walk away. She had gifts like that. She’d survey the wisdom of the crowd and make proclamations that people tended not to believe, but… Read more →
Raging dry wind slams the door startling as a gunshot waking me to the old arguments and longings. The bronzed bed I was dreaming entwined with a fruit-laden vine recedes, and I’m back here where the marriage is dead and the wind rasps parched junipers, rattles the blinds. Oh, for some moisture. I rise, go out and try to walk… Read more →
She loved a man who loved words as competition, tiled board games given expedience electronically, so many ways to play the order of letters out each evening while screen noise projects its shows and sirens, its men flanked by beauty as bodies, the female form a dressing. So few ways to say each word in a sentence and mean happiness,… Read more →
Finally I saw your wrists only turned three ways, your knees went only up and down, I was tangled with you, always tangled. It took me so long to know where you ended, I’d been so thrilled you moved at all. But there was only one way when you were up against me, and after it was so hard to… Read more →