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 →
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 →
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 →
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?
Talking Soutine
The Houses (1921) Wind whipped orange roofs, errant flames. A writhing, thrusting of coiled greens, vertical whites, like candles dripping with war. One, front-center, the tallest, skinniest boy, eyes startled wide. Carcass of Beef (1924) Chain hung, flooded with blood, bucketed and bought fresh. Who has ever known such red. Marrow-soaked space, thin white strings tied tight to form. Memory’s… Read more →
Retirement Plans
My boss says my methods make me a dinosaur, doomed to go extinct. Did those majestic reptiles pinch nostrils at the stench of tar pits, resigned to a final plunge? Maybe. But scholars assert the interval between T-Rexes and Stegosauruses exceeded the interval between T-Rexes and homo sapiens. I might last a little while longer. Many of my scales still… Read more →
This poem is a door
is a body I hear tapping against the window a leafless body scratching against the door much larger than the bird singing in the lacing forest beyond the window all things are full of gods this body singing from the shadowed ring of trees that is this door where we were carried by the body’s music toward the moon dragging… Read more →
Externality
the only externality for the recycle symbol on the toothpaste tube was the cost of the engineer’s hours answering the question can we print the symbol and OK the lawyer’s examining the regs or maybe the engineer had to develop a way to make a tube that met stipulations but there it is seen regularly each morning and evening allowing… Read more →