Eventually, we all leave our bodies behind. The first time that this occurred to me, I was, I think, nine years old, and my parents and I had flown to Albuquerque, New Mexico to meet with my podiatrist and discuss the prospect of another surgery. I’d had five already, but after each, the bones in my left foot had begun… 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 →
I never promised to write you into meaning. That’s what lying is for. Like this: the moon is made of soap. I’m telling you a story. I should have been there to say goodbye. Yesterday, I unnamed you. It was easy enough to pull at your long body and think this is a warning. The moon is a thumbnail. If… Read more →
…but there is only time for fasting and desire, device and design, there is only time to swerve without limbs, organs or face into a scientific silence, pinhole of light —Michael Palmer I Chronology is a field of stars. The mythologue’s statistics a zodiacal map, a glowing quotient taking shape. You know you’re old when you scrapbook the car crash… Read more →
I recommend the 2002 anthology of essays on Hybrid Maternity ed. by Prudence DeWitt and Angela Burney for its attention to syntactical fidelity and matrimonial pathology. Traditionally men transformed prior to sexual encounters with women. Zeus was notorious, for instance, for turning himself into a variety of animals. When he encounters Leda, he turns himself into the swan. It was far more… Read more →
Occupy They weren’t really squatters, per se. He looked at it like it was payback, dividends from years of working shithole jobs in exhausting Wall Street firms. And it wasn’t so bad, better than jail. An interesting influx of dwellers. Late night poker games. Until she moved in. Until the chanting started. Until the first time he thought: perhaps I’m… Read more →
Stella Richter’s Boston friends said her Manhattan apartment reminded them of Miami Beach. They meant it as a slur, and she took it that way. She still played her father’s Bechstein in the corner of the living room every afternoon—Handel, Mozart, Bach—she knew the pieces all by heart and hardly missed a note though she hadn’t taken a lesson in… Read more →