The boy in the labyrinth knows the possibilities of darkness: either the beast or not the beast. Either motion or stillness. Flowers push their heads through eye sockets. A little breath hushes the velvet black. God’s eyes pierce the gloom. The boy thinks about the minotaur’s music and his own lost ball of string. Whether the nest at the heart… Read more →
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead. –William Stafford, “Traveling Through the Dark” He doesn’t mind filling chuckholes, painting lines, plowing snow, but hates mornings when he clocks in, sees “Road Kill” next to his name. The first starts with a raccoon, bloated and sweet on the yellow line of Route 162. We usually leave small… Read more →
is found in the back of journals that are only written by the victors. It’s not uncommon to find entries revised into myths or a soldier’s groan nestled within the burly spine. After reading the index, the most troubling reference was a story detailing a 7-year-old Iraqi girl, who knocked on the driver’s side window of a HUMVEE with her… Read more →
The boy in the labyrinth hums. An old tune. A tune from a long dream. A dream with beasts, filled with the odor of cumin and turmeric. A yellowed melody heard from somewhere but he cannot remember, having spent so many days looking at the sky, losing his place in the maze. Smells of earth, thick and autumnal. And the… Read more →
only a girl gets ruined prom dress soaked updo down. hideous ruin, head full of murder. bones under skin already in ruin starved thin, blood without oxygen heart beating only from habit red ruin boys make their way by ruin snake-like belts, hooded eyes, chapped fingers finding skin girls’ ruin lies in others’ hands behold this ruin—frosted with rage riddled… Read more →
The boy in the labyrinth is led by his heart. Its thick systolic lurch. Its clear call from the carotid’s shunt. Somewhere the minotaur refuses to say hello. Somewhere lost moths beat themselves to death against a torch’s reflection. The actual light somewhere, which is a silence between the boy and the beast. That understanding. That repetition of silences as… Read more →
The boy in the labyrinth feeds the flame of his torch. Strips torn from his robe coil around the base for fire. And as the fire grows, so does his knowledge of the cold. The frayed ends of his threads wave like bare roots. The fire eats the air as lazy waves radiate in the haze. His bare thighs twitch…. Read more →
The damp rust-colored spot like a dry lily on the pink underwear, the ache in her middle, the smell of wet cement or leaves decaying. Her best friend has a paper bag hidden in her locker, sealed with 20 staples at the folded top. In the semi-privacy of the “Hiny-Hider” stall, the bag crackles, the noise echoing a… Read more →
there are comeheres from the oranged, lit street, from the hilled and hump-browed wood above. silvering dam, concrete lines swiveling out; by these mills the hulled dusk shredding, stamped with porticos, and slabs, and stories of light. but paper-winged, boxed as origami: these sights shrugged like water: where is that generator you used to have, the heavy-bottomed the electric… Read more →
She swallowed me, when we were young; or sidled like a shoplifter, over, till our outlines joined. Sometimes I vibrate just above her body, so she can feel the air move through her spaces. And when she can’t talk about her parents’ wills, or panics before a trip, when her heart breathes drab flashes of fear through a body so… Read more →