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?
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 →
KÜCHENIDYLLE, OR—A STRIP OF FISH IS JOY
after Küchenidylle by Anton Ebert A woman’s sunbathed earlobe with— two gold globes deliberately dangled. Her cheek reflects a rose. In front of her, a fat carrot glows. And here, I almost said— something about savoring. A strip of fish pinched in her fingertips. Whiskers glint, a cat’s furred lips & ready tongue. We can always catch the light if—… Read more →
24
(iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii iiii) candles form a frame around buttercream roses. i exhale but (i) flame remains thumbing through the great divorce twin engines force forward a valerian breeze. i venture out for an evening stroll but the neighborhood softball games and ice cream truck’s music box jingle melt into golden hour glances on crunchy september lawns grayed street… Read more →