When they say I am nothing like my family everywhere I begin to see my son. The days loll into clammy pages, stain my hands indigo. This is what cleaning affords me: a soup lid in a trash bag slices my leg. Blood smears dirty plastic. I smash the coffee pot on the counter. If glass is bound… Read more →
I circle the date, buy a calendar, repeat steps to questions in the shower, deliver myself as close as I can to the platform. You get off a green line train to the left of my complex. The third sentence is No one’s turned up. You’re screaming. No one wants to eat. I’m running through my hair. We’re together in… Read more →
Every country has a me to be sad about. A mine. A isn’t this another, same time? We talk us up through a flurry, pace downhill. Class is college when you’re attending to it. There’s a train because one’s here & we are still, aimed for concrete.
bustling with bombs, with Bond girls, with balmy weather. Fawns stayed very still, immovable even from fright, and their mothers taught them never to stray into the road. We sat perched on chairs, binoculars in hand, spying their spots, nestled next to land mines. In the bathtub, I peel lengths of skin from my… Read more →
if a house if a house on a hill near trees and lake if the lake, if trees if a house on the lake, brown, sullen, the overthrown river bloated in boats, treated to feed a water’s need in creation, if a house up the slope, stares down to edge agape if a house, if the lake so many mouths… Read more →
“Man,” I cried, “how ignorant art thou in thy pride and wisdom!” — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Perhaps Shelley’s doctor had the right of it: lightening animates the dead, opening lungs to air, if such flow is signature of life. Inhale, and oxygen’s own desire to pair suggests a weaving, this thin trail of atoms recombinant not of self, but of… Read more →
upon waking: the in of it, the out of it bright streak of blood after the rain of newness, the newness of rain tell me how to speak in this silence I am learning a language of gesture [ ] [ ] [ ] hello cardinal on the greeting card chickadee on the fence this year I will be grateful… Read more →
We were all afraid to get near until my sister poked him. He didn’t move, had somehow made it through the woods and fields in a blizzard to find our front porch. We used the shovel to scoop him and carried him inside, the flames low by then. Had we not burned the extra wood, he might never have woken,… Read more →
1 Here, a stove is luxury. An indoor toilet. A cup of clean water. 2 Elsewhere, black heart of the festering fruit. White grin of flies. Body hanging from a bridge. 3 Here, second hand shoes. Horse’s dry prepuce. 4 Elsewhere, dinner: fist of hair. 5 Elsewhere, head full of lice. Blow flies forcing the mouth to open.
For Christmas you give your father three hundred dollars to buy dentures. Toothless, he must now suck meat, juice it up with saliva, grind it with pinkish jaws till it’s ready for swallowing. He’ll go across the border, to Mexico, where it’s cheapest, but more dangerous. You tell him how young boys will follow him, begging to shine his shoes…. Read more →