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 →
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 →
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 / 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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
Author’s note: During 1894-1895, Annie “Londonderry” Cohen Kopchovsky rode her bicycle around the world. Legend has it she set off with a pearl-handled revolver and a change of underwear—and nothing else. I am indebted to the research of Peter Zheutlin in Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride, 2007.
A scream evolved to scrape DNA, low to the ground and right against the foundation. You know you should investigate but tangled in blankets sink back to sleep. When the snow melts, you’ll find North America’s only marsupial turned inside out at the top of her range. Not hibernators, they unkink themselves from culverts and come looking for a meal…. Read more →
We leave alone for more people, travelling with the news of sickness. Palaces of death sentences. Organ echoing off gold. I find a home to walk myself asleep inside. There, I pose for your picture. Near the exit where bright could happen. And if this city could forget itself, the better. Breaking the weather into fractions. I didn’t expect these… Read more →