Monster with a Name
Forget everything today.What death we’re on, our lockedroom bodies, how outside windowsswell marches beneath raised batons.Forget under the bed breathe monsterswho only know how to pronounce your name. Once upon a lie we set a foreston fire, naked and delighted.But it grew back.Each tree exploding from sapboiled inside — forget it.Wolves and crows fled. Shut windows. Who needs air? This… Read more →
Other Mothers’ Babies
Once, I worked nights. I drove through the darkness to other people’s houses, sat on their couches, held their babies while they slept. Sometimes I would sleep while the baby slept, rising along with them, feeding them bottles of their mother’s milk. Mostly I stayed awake. Alone, except for some small creature lying beside me. The whorl of hair on… Read more →
Falling Apart
For my life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing: my strength fails because of my iniquity, and my bones are consumed. – Psalms 31:10 I sob with intense kinks exhale zephyrs & it is that from the body are issues of life & man is a god breathing into his own sorrows the breath of life… Read more →
Signals
Two years after you died,I picked your box of ashes upoff the table and cradledthem like a newborn inmy arms. You were there, a flicker ofyou in a suit for work, or the uglymaroon and gold sweatpantsat home, and then,you were gone. Taken in an instant,walking while someone wasgoing 35mph.Red and blue lights flashedat dusk, a warning gone offtoo late…. Read more →
All Things You Are in the Key of E
tacos strewn on the green egress, where bloomed the dandelion we picked like lilies sun pitched in the middle of the sky as third eye in swath of blue, my tiny red striped t shirt, sleeveless, and taut, the nipples already showing at ten at ten, i was not concerned at ten i should have been concerned the world rolls… Read more →
Ima on her Eighty Eighth Birthday
Calling relatives during the pandemic How we are she said like plant lice on the stem of a creamy rose. She smiles into the video camera and her white hair like a halo. Pink aphids, horrifying, confused in the small 3D of the stem’s curve, she says, all of us even the president the queen a green louse can be… Read more →
Hanging at Valley View Mall
You would call, quotingthe let us go, then, you and I—with lessthan ten, but eyes for watching.Two girls on a benchin a space without weather,we made up stories about othersand all the love having gone.And wasn’t it sad—how the nightstretched out before them?Later we’d walk in the wrongdirection, pet the cashmere and longfor the pair, order smoothiesand drink them down,… Read more →
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend
I know I’m in trouble when I start dreaming of a man harvestingovaries with a melon baller, the women just sitting at the table,waiting their turn. I wake, seeing I’m in for it in the real world,maybe already in the middle of it. I haven’t been drinkingor eating those Thai noodles with the spicy peanut sauce I love.I’ve been good,… Read more →
Dust
The dust came after the elderly woman next door passed away. They carried off her belongings and then gutted her apartment. The racket of hammers and other non-musical instruments would wake me before my alarm each morning. The banging was nearly rhythmic enough to support a song, gnawing at my irritated nervous system like a tune invented for Nazi torture…. Read more →