The history book says girls were dragged from their houses and tied to telephone poles followed by unspeakable torture. What was not unspeakable were the narrow prison closets and forced prostitutes who bit their fingers and drew the country’s flag in blood outside their doors. It was unspeakable that the officers carved Butcher on their foreheads. The girls hiding knives… Read more →
She loved the burned parts, crusts, the sauce gone to sludge at the bottom of the pan, bacon curled in on itself, still crackling as she brought it to her mouth, blew away the smoke, “Nice” she’d say, the egg white rimmed in black lace, or forking up the wrinkled butt of the roast, chewing the tough meat to a… Read more →
the thinness of her salmon arms slipping through the white sheets knotted like a noose or a cherry stem tied by her tongue she was balled up fury and clenched fists with a body who never quite listened to her directions her mind had a mind of its own and she tasted purple and veiny and smallit was selfish of… Read more →
Hauled off harried by raw earth, holy, wounded, disrobed, both him and her hard-pressed against a rifle, or a silver knife, hand-to-hand on a straw mattress, or a foxhole, his and her trenches. Warpath of Banzai charge, the origin of the term: “A man would rather be shattered jade than a complete roof tile.” All bodies befall humiliation, hot stinging… Read more →
They say, How can you put up with it? My dress red as a reason. They say, He wants a divorce. But he’s always had some Tootsie behind the scenes. Silk caught in his throat. Now when he lowers me into the casket, I dream of the sword swallower’s silver tongue.
How did it feel to cook before me– to eat? Years ago I became moored on a dessert island– not a desert island, you see, but a place where I got up at midnight in a stranger’s home and padded downstairs to bake. At night my cupcakes were gastro-astronomical– as it is, we use our gullets to look down dark… Read more →
I dug up garnets west of Chatham. They stared like blood ruby eyes across a tobacco field, a weedy ditch. They felt like burnt, swollen pennies. I hid them all summer in a big clam shell. I gave them to a cousin one night. He grinned and said, sew a dark cloth around them, bag them up like heaven. He… Read more →
The quiver of prairie grass reminds me of birdsong, and all those mornings I rose from one life into another. From that life where I would run, feet callused from paspalum and rye out to corn silos I took for the end of the world, until I walked farther— until it shrank and shriveled like chicken wire. I cut myself… Read more →
(Amun, the Egyptian god who is invoked at the end of Jewish and Christian prayers) I’d paint myself red. Like Gabriel’s copper-tinted wings in the window at Basilique Saint-Denis. The light would pass through me & I’d color—I’d change—everything. The magic of course, I always say, is not in being sawn in half, but in the rebirth Climbing… Read more →
There’s always finger food after a funeral, tasty cakes and the like, but nobody’s wrapping dinner rolls in napkins so I fill mine, bulk up my chest and thigh pockets. Sure, my refrigerator has become a bag of baby carrots, curry paste, the door full to the gunwales with capless condiment bottles; a third straight cold shower means the boiler… Read more →