A spark bird is first love, the bird that ignites a heightened interest, an out-of-the-blue fascination. I was sparked by the Bewick’s wren, a small bird with a big voice. Not brilliantly hued like a cardinal or bluejay, my starter bird, my first infatuation, is gray-brown with stark white eyebrow stripes and a perky, black-streaked tail. I first singled them… Read more →
late Spring, 2020 So this is how it happens. Two days in, I tell my girlfriend that I want a pool so I could scream underwater. I’m afraid the bathtub’s reverberations would worry the dogs, and in-ground concrete can absorb more than cannonballs, muffled calls of “Marco,” summer thunder. I can already taste chlorine— can puff-cheeks, emit an upward dribbleof… Read more →
The first New Year’s I spent alone, I doused everything I ate [on wedding-dinner plates] in grass-fed cultured butter: filet,langoustines, asparagus. Decadence honors our absence, memorialize another night amidthis limbo of emancipation: in three weeks I will be free. [Waiting for the date is like having blood drawnafter doctor’s orders to see if the disease was contracted or in your… Read more →
“It is certain…that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”— James Baldwin Blue glass coversBlack moth.This glassis translucent,glazed slickin fire so hot,it forgetsits own past Moth fluttersunder the weightof its own. Youwanted to save it,heard wingsbeat, hush-like,but worriedits hunger, worried it wasa hunger meantfor things loved:wool of warmth,cotton quilt,fine things,mementos. And sothe glass stays. We… Read more →
I walk on the ice of my pleasures I walk between miracles and confusionI walk inside a rose —Adonis I’m making my way over ice not a coolslick foot thick hardened slab that keepsdrowning inaccessible but these jammed broken chunks floating in the air of metal gray running water the soles of my feet stabbed by this frosty jagged ground… Read more →
in the evening, when bluemeets orange, and there is a kind of silence to the skyand the trees, and you thinkabout the things you can onlythink about when its dark,there is a certain empty you feel, like you are a thief in the night, and perhapsit’s the night you are stealing,like the things you want to say become a drain… Read more →
Near the kitchen window, overlooking the brick canyons of this somber city, where narrow alleys channel and hold the echoes of countless curses hostage, blowing up through the streets of damp laundry on the line chasing down the concrete alleyways where antagonists never let up, and fear follows as fast and furious as a little girl’s running legs, my father is reading names out of a book, searching for the new… Read more →
Older, I should be thatsubtle creature, the animal squeezing heart from mouth.I’m a sequence of years trying to solve a room through a glass window. We wait, duplicate a paradox, verify an awkward pause. I want to open skeletons, to come warm-bloodedinto a faint decay, the afternoon enough to run down menace. Modern, I lay on the coffee table, smiling…. Read more →
It was a kind of softness—the thick tongue I curled around sunshine, unexpectedly distressed.The machinery in me slipped, an electric sizzle, delirious. I listened to the radio, breathing. At heart it was possible—to travel forward out there creating a door into the lights, the space extending careful along the stairway, body bent frantic. I’m hollow at the moment, backed into… Read more →