from loss. From holding so closely that one’s chest is red as the other’s and heavy with short breath, from which to pull away one is wet with the tears cried by the other at the thought of the pulling away; from which the idea can be extrapolated that this is it: the place where one has come to be… Read more →
What I keep hoping is that words are like boomerangs and come back, or that he will fall into his own trap; I keep hoping to see a hand (just a hand) writing on the wall; I want the people to see he has no clothes, and most of all I want some little dog to pull aside the… Read more →
Enya descends her mountain on the equinox. She carries a quiver, a bow, a handful of arrows. She is hunting shadows, tonight so scarce and therefore so valuable, her calculations precise when it comes to supply and demand. Her footsteps are silent, her bowstring pulled taut, her body like smoke or water, rarely in the shape of a woman. She… Read more →
My mother sits next to me, her fake fur Borganzia coat buttoned up, her black velvet cloche pulled low on her forehead. It’s August. She’s penciled the beauty spot onto her right cheek and wears her designer eyeglasses with the rhinestone B for Beatrice winking on the lower right lens. She smells like Evening in Paris with an underwaft of… Read more →
As dawn divides the sea from firmament, the island appears to float above the indigo shimmer, if there is no fog to make us forget. Clear days the joke revives— The island is uninhibited— for only in dreams is it peopled. Just last night a tribe of irrepressible hominids with blue abdomens and flourishing sex lives held the island in… Read more →
2,000 Nigerians slaughtered, a whole village emptied. You sit at a table for 12 for your son’s 37th birthday along with his wife, her hand caressing her pregnant belly. Between them, bubbling water through his straw, their small boy, a pocket mirror of your son. Syrian men, heads down, arms outstretched, hands on each other’s shoulders, marched to their death…. Read more →
To live is to serve, my mother’s motto, to blow on the burn, salve the wound, wind miles of gauze bandages, to pull the fork from the hand jammed to the growing bone by a father’s blunt fist, the nice gone from her eyes when she met him in the hall. She had opinions she never kept to herself, bruised… Read more →
He had charged at me across the deep swamp with a razor blade bound tightly to a stick. On his body, we found a postcard (with nothing on it) and a photograph of an old man carrying a bundle of orchids. There was no sign of his country, or faith. This man who barreled towards me, while I brandished a… Read more →
In the locker room before the game, the players don’t know what to make of me dry-humping the doorframe in my armadillo disguise. My stitched smile is fixed, reveals nothing; my huge head muffles my laughter. By the end of the first half I’m sidelined, pacing back & forth in front of the row of the faithful cheerleaders who wear… Read more →
After Li-Young Lee under the mattress the bedframe recycled steel above sleep the mattress semi-eco still made of foam but some of it castor bean instead of petroleum above space and a draught which he says is just a bad word for fresh air sound of the blinds against the window in the draught underneath the mattress and the frame all the old nightmares those months I could only sleep with the light on the closet light… Read more →