She watched the fishermen drag the boy up the muddy bank. His hair the only thing moving. * Mother made her chamomile tea, while the neighbor whispered through the steam: twice the size— had to slice the seam of his suit— She imagined him split in two, the fine line between dressed and undressed. She dropped her cookie into her… Read more →
Anything transmitted by blood, anything “generational” makes you feel accursed or a queen, depending. If it is in the water, so as in mother’s milk and the cow’s milk and the calf’s. It is in airport souvenirs at Da Nang, in the soil, in the worms, in the brown glass of a Tiger beer bottle, which everyone on Facebook keeps… Read more →
When the CNN reporter asks a woman at the Kabul market why after ten years of liberation do wives still walk behind their husbands, she replies landmines. Sometimes practical answers are the most unimaginable. I was going to say something about the half-mast flag of American exceptionalism, but then the sun came out on this, the last Sunday in May… Read more →
There is a kind of pressure in humans to take what is most beloved to them and smash it. – Anne Carson If my despair shatters could I hurt you: Wobble neck snapped. In my hands. I break you into scream… ease does not wash me, rock water begins its pound: Swim, I tell myself, Swim— but deep… Read more →
Jutka, I miss your fingers, the touch I know only now that it is gone. My fellow soldier is not deft, puncturing skin as he plies splinters from my ass, the needle clumsy in his paws. His idea – a night out of this hole, the danger receding, safety in disguise. We dressed like ugly spinsters, but Soviet dicks are… Read more →
: inperchment If you put a tiger in a tree you are asking a child to read the bible. Not a or an, as in umbilical cord: fluids pumped through then solid and gross and the bible, and other things not solid, more able, prepared. Articles, really. Indirect and implied and not. The gimmy-two-shoe-shuffle, and butter,… Read more →
Cindy’s work is in quotation marks. Years back she bought a cloudbuster hoping she could make it rain enough to flood the basement of her mother the logomancer’s corporate office. Some forms of divination you can count on to fail but tea-leaves will always tell what color hair the writer had before she killed the lead. Cindy’s been stirring Darjeeling… Read more →
The boy has collected beestings in his cupped hands, one small thorn for every day he’s been away from home. This is a way to indicate the weather has changed, the body’s slow sacrifice to spring. After the snow leaves, a yard looks smaller, the windows see more or too much or just enough empty space to be confused with… Read more →
The stitches will unstitch themselves, the doctor says, but not before the roof of your mouth has fused with your bottom gums on your lowermost gingival palate. Your teeth in a bowl on the window you used to keep change in. Little executives, your molar sockets, taking off their suits at the end of a forty-year day, lapsing back into… Read more →
The year no one died, I called you my little skin-walker, my secret satchel of words. What can’t be fixed by honesty will go unnoticed. Look to where the voice is: an ache in the earth loud enough to be mistaken for regret. Dearest, it was cutting off your braid that broke the spell—that tiny rattail marked you as mine…. Read more →