it’s the new year 21st century & old history is breathing fresh but look: Bessie came back. And she is lit, lemme tell you. She ain’t Bigger’s Bessie, never was. She got her own claims to Big. That busted brick over her head, that body-freeze in all-consuming snow after he threw her body down his shaft? That shove ain’t gonna… Read more →
At the abandoned Air Force base, we walk through crumbling military houses. Vines crawl through the windows of nineteen-fifty style bathrooms. I feel as though a vacuum has been applied to my chest, like the air has been sucked from my body into the void. You wander over glass shards and moldering linoleum floors, your posture in a perpetual shrug…. Read more →
the females cost less than the males smaller slimmer shimmers of other veiltails above blue mustard throats swelling dorsal fins fluorescents distorted by wet walls no one with eyes & an anal fin deserves flat plastic for a sky even if it is cloudless if it dies in less than 14 days freeze the body & bring it back for… Read more →
As though some monstrosity were pecking its way out of our most penetrable parts and needed this pointed apparatus to crack through the shell walls that delimit our hard hearts, the heartbeak exists mostly where a missing r has plummeted out of heartbreak, leaving something sharper and clearer— this lance-like structure, this projection perfect for breaking, and thereby making a… Read more →
When the phone rang so late at night at her parents’ house, Angie knew it had to be relatives—either her father’s in India or her mother’s in Baltimore. From her perch at the top of the stairs on the second floor, she heard that it was her mother’s people: a cousin Elizabeth saying that Aunt Pina, her mother’s sister, died… Read more →
rolling ribboned smoke spits sound a breath of thunder calls from the mouth of morning I hear angels who learned to shriek and not to sing every day; I lean over their song I step from beat to beat and sway through repetition and count seconds mirrored between days – one, two, three – cold turns to boil on my… Read more →
Love me some thunder but not when it threatens to crack open the delicate shell of my wedding day to Tootie Miller. Tootie, all swag-haired and sparkletooth and me, my belly full of Tootie’s kid, five months round by now. When Tootie proposed after six years of on and off and other women and then floating back to me, it… Read more →
The idea of it is to go forward into the trees or what at least we can call phrases and smoke from fire. Two phrases could have burst and have interconnected, too melancholy, a fountain, a fierce sense, that the world is summer and suddenly going to become true. As insects fall like laughter between our words, insects the summer… Read more →
