Seth watches me shiver and hug myself, sliding my fingers over shoulders and forearms. “It was real right?” I ask. “Yes” he answers. I’m wearing a hospital gown, hair up in a horrible bun, pale-skinned, suicidal—or so I said. The nurse checks my pulse for the second time. A breakfast tray sits on a stainless-steel surface near my bed surrounded… Read more →
Here she is now, all notepad and ears, Telling me a thought is a thought is a thought Is not a rose. Is not love, loss, or identity. I want to say: Rose is the colour of everything rose-coloured. I’m thinking: it can’t hurt, it’s only a dream. Mouth corner rising, she makes a note. Something in me takes up… Read more →
Pink swamp beyond, claw me down to unstitch itches, full of opal emeralds and intact eyelids. Cold machine I cradle, please release the needle, poor tapered worm we are. In and unearthed. Slander the ragged remainder—good folk are fine, but a closed corpse can’t be crawled into. From below holler our apologizers, as I could reach out and take their… Read more →
And true enough, sometimes I imagine spiders with a longing unbecoming of an arachnophobe: Wrest eight knuckled legs from nothing weave ten fingers over my eyes stealing looks amidst primal shudders. What a dirty thrill. What a thing to write home about this existing in a calamitous light. It is as if, you say, you want to die. This, after… Read more →
Many times in your Bronx apartment, I showered with the window open to the five-story tree that broke your cousin’s fall when he leapt from the roof on purpose. He said it wasn’t the branches that caught him, but his dead father’s trench coat. What I didn’t tell you was sometimes I heard it flapping, buttons clicking against buttons, and… Read more →
i’ve seen them crawl up from the lake draped in weeds whispering names and something worse than obscenities hungry gums flecked with gleaming scales can’t you hear them march in time the way the mud slurps with every step they are coming they are coming the faint handprint on the mailbox is no accidental collusion of rain and grime their… Read more →
this was somebody’s idea of paradise. a history loaded heavy with douglas fir, suspenders, and trucker hats. the townsfolk reminisce about industry. about the one log load. old growth giants hauled from a washboard to the lumber mills. these days, most are husks of broken windows and spray paint. the woods are crowded and dry as matchsticks. and the trucks… Read more →
there is a bowl with eight sharks and each shark is a gray mirror painted in different directions of wind. I flap my arms wildly in these tears to create a hole that resembles my face. at the edge of the bowl are my eight faces that reek of forgotten sunlight—as if sharks search for my sleeping bones. my sweating… Read more →
The small animal of my body curls in comfort at the sound of the rain, curls in the back seat of my car when I’m off the trail and clouds unfurl, and I’m dry, and the rain falls about. The small animal of my body does not know I have somehow become an adult. He does not know to hide… Read more →
the grass stays awake in father’s chest waits for static water recycled 허수 or strips its coats of lily herding boats from the dead our shoes that harbor cracked toes our slowness a veil no funeral the pipes will now fish for soil and ink