Body Count
Body Count is a heavy metal band fronted by Ice-T. Twenty-one years after their founding they received a Grammy Award for the song “Bum Rush” which features lyrics such as “It’s all twisted, the game is bent / Still no clean water in Flint.” Between 1986-98 there were four Hollywood movies named Body Count. The highest audience score on Rotten… Read more →
Back in Iowa, Looking Out the Window at Rebekah’s Parents’ House
In the aching morning light, you see straight to the field of scrub and vines, and beyond it, to the run-down gate, half-closing the path to where the maple-sap drips as grapes deflate in the waning summer, and knapweeds, coarse but erect, rebel and push through the soil. Rebekah once told you that, as a child, she uprooted those pillars… Read more →
full landscape with no exit
I didn’t do it : the crisp light by itself mounted the statue and silence bleeds in my throat mauve-orchid the color of your eyes full mauve like a cathedral opens a secret door : stay on page so you could breathe but breathing is a flower with sharp teeth or stop thinking of me or break my bones and… Read more →
Lily
A lily of the valley walked in and said the world is doomed I didn’t know what to say I studied the lily of the valley and not knowing what to say I said why? money said the lily money for money’s sake also time blocks of time I offered her ice from my cup I had no money or… Read more →
Riddle
The joy shimmied out by years of spreadsheets daydreams that rust into a retirement buried by the silver spade, flicked out of a deck slick like an afternoon sweat. How can a monthly invoice slipped from an envelope, read aloud like an incantation, memorized like a riddle, throw the sky to the earth?
I sift crumbs in sheets
I sift crumbs in sheets, shift in bed as stars tick in the sky. My body moons. It filled with milk my children drank, and now it is black tea. The bitterness of over-steeping wrestles with my tongue. But I have plucked a peach from every day. I’m fuzzy on the details of my life. Its pits pile up inside… Read more →
Power Lines
I fear the cold, walls will fall away. Someone will pull the pins and a map of tsunamis will cover us. The power lines take our power. I fear my blood won’t come. Somebody will take my body and make me a house for someone else to haunt. I fear saying the word no. Because what do I know? I… Read more →
aubade
the golden god of morning stands up smacks its head against the cloud ceiling and blacks out under a circle of cartoon birds peeping it’s always the birds that make me glad to be back their sparse cadences scatter over the dream shadows which drop away like clothing scarf on the chair sock on the stair a sparrow brings me… Read more →
Creek Hiking
A lesson in treading lightly sometimes for miles a trail where everything vanishes except the next rock: blue-green, heathered by moss, weathered by the same water that Heraclitus brooked. After each leap, critters loosen from the waterlogged oak, a feast for the creek bed, that dams the cool fluidity, loam-perturbed, lifted by the skin at the arch—