Self-Portrait as Wildfire
say it was the red of ponderosas lit shimmering as negligees say the sun kept tabs on your act say it was years of you not picking up your shit needles brush chips say a line was crossed say it was the heat … Read more →
Single at Costco Under Late Capitalism
“One Diet Pepsi, please,” I say to the woman in a blue polo shirt spotted with pizza grease. She swipes at a bead of sweat at the fringe of her hairnet. “That’ll be 63 cents.” I come to Costco on Fridays at 2, just after I teach a senior seminar on popular culture criticism. This would be a great place… Read more →
HOMOEOMERY/PHOTISM/POETRY’S END
Will she nill she—incorpsed again, facades pilling along the blighted Michigan Ave, floaters pilling from the feckless firmament, warping pregnant sleech exposed the font from which theurgy comes and goes, hebona to behold. Il’s hand passes through the window of her mother’s Oldsmobile and can’t let go the air. She’s out there underneath the pilling suspended. The carlot pennons stop… Read more →
The Moon Can Be Full or Honey but Never Have Bees
ILLY BEFORE MEIR
The overpass’ chainlinked fence fishscaled opaline about the trammeled sun. Filmed ’comb. A cell a time allows the isinglassvista. Subjacent tractortrailer roofs contain the golden rings aqueous in their locked extropy. Hypaethral exit extant. Hermatypic whorling clouds earthending sunburnt. From an interstategrotto the white horse triplicates irreal as déjàmoon. In each object a solid flame instantiates the myth of time. … Read more →
Born Again
I had never practiced it— the childhood art of dipping, of patience—holding the wire circle steady for white to turn wine and not just a runny pink— a period’s end. But now dying Easter eggs, vinegar soaked fingers grasp a perfect sky blue before it turns rain—a bruised, overworked watercolor. I wanted to give her life—readied the cradle all last… Read more →
When the Butterflies Died
I trace my footsteps in the dust of a butterfly’s torn wings, we were knocked from the sky by the teeth of hungry bullets fired from guns of men with severed heads; they wanted to hear a butterfly scream, they wanted God to fall from heaven,… Read more →
ICHOR
A kiddypool filled with gartersnakes in Il’s friend Jon’s backyard beyond her family’s half of duplex. Thumbing off their heads, his eyes on them, Jon’s dad glossolaliaed. The world at once rugous vellum, verrucous coction, veins unpuzzling. It was not blood that issued. It had never been. I’ve seen the great beyond, Il wrote hotelled wellpaid, the couple prepping in… Read more →