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?
Bachelard and the Artist Interrupt Each Other
outside & inside my lines, oily red are both scribbled intimate spaces matter of passion they are always heat and downbeat ready to be brushed away reversed the hand tries to exchange their limned loops of ` hostility bodies pained if there exists a refugee in a borderline shadowed shade surface caught in between such masked smiles an inside of… Read more →
My mother spins the compost
One bin is a big black barrel that spins and spins and one is a barrel for collecting rain water and there are scattered cups and tubs amidst the matted grass, half-closed lids full of tomato rinds and avocado skins. She shows me what’s inside the barrel, but it’s too cold to smell the earth so I focus my eyes… Read more →
The Girl Who Felt Colors
The house had nowhere to go. I let it hold me. Turning sixteen, I knew Already that things keep on Looking the same. They don’t rub off, I thought. Closing my eyes I started to feel the blue Like little crosses. The orange different, Wanting to draw my fingers in. It stuck. The Crimea is a hard place. I turned… Read more →
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 →