Coal mining as loss-chasing
I don’t gamble much, but the mine struck me as casino- ish. Nobody ends up there accidently, there’s no windows, there’s no clocks, every last machine beeps and flashes, every last light’s strategically placed and in between it’s unsettling dark. I saw a bird underground once, and a mushroom under a beltline that dripped a chemical composition evidently nutritious enough… Read more →
Leisure Time
preen the image | in the videochat camera | gaze all day at it \ rub the teeth with finger | while conversing / with far-distant brethren | subsist / by self-soothing touch | license self | dole of chocolate | or iteration | of Candy Crush | mind modulates self | self-replicating machines | from the start | by… Read more →
From Ashes
I am not grieving, even underneath the forest canopy though the edges of my life have curled where the leaf litter crumbles like paper set on fire, charred and turned into decay that feeds a more precious nature due to its brush with death and more tinder-like qualities: dry, brittle, catches with abundantly close vigor, burns long enough to release… Read more →
The Story That Needs You
After Emily Bernard A mother’s blackberry heart ferments, juices. It’s not that her voice jellies. It’s that she’s beholden to therapy for sixteen-year-olds. Cliff she can’t help. Lick she can’t taste. The whir of the question: Do fathers get asked what their children think of their work? No clouds, no brambled bush, no story.
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 →
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 →