Slipway
At the edge of the yard, a blue tarp flutters like a trapped lung. Beneath it, the hull of a boat half-built, its ribs pale as driftwood. My father sands cedar planks, resin clotting amber on his fingertips. He never speaks of the island he left— just corrects my hammer grip, says: Measure twice. Wood remembers every mistake. Tide pushes… Read more →
Sagebrush
Tieton, WA Gunshots pitter in the distance.The cows sing along to their loved ones being put down.Along the service road, the highway, any undomesticated piece of land,the sage puffs up and out, reaching — who can make a little tree of themselvesbefore we’re all burned down? I rely on the wind. It’s blowing the valley’sinsects at my body. Not an… Read more →
Mushroom Hunting: A Villanelle for the End of the World
1. I want a lover I can survive the end of the world with. And I mean that literally–when society and abstraction fail, I want someone who knows something about water and growth and soil, who knows how to live like an animal, according to the natural laws of the world, and not just the ones men make up for… Read more →
Night Passions
The coliseum’s breathtakingly variegated, like flower gardens, coral reefs, buffet spreads. A pass isn’t an expression of desire but an ejaculation. Every spiral arc is hugged and tucked away. The knights have fetishes: kneeling, jumping up in sync with each snap, and thrusting. When tackling starts, helmets glitter with the electric glow of neon signs. Feel me. Wrap your digits… Read more →
Rhizome Bombs
An American sentence acrostic Released by age, pharmaceutical rot, infection,by spiral cracks in the foundation, the determining if brief canaling of roots, our teeth lose their blood-warmth and descend from their gummy nests like ants. At first just one. Then, an absurdtrickle, like bitcoin, like stock. Down they come, crushed ice of molars, slivered canines,from the dark quilt of a… Read more →
The Raft of Sixty-Six Sticks
I reveled in form: drove at 4 am to Safeway for one carrot, bought grapes instead. The cashier asked how I was, as if we were parrots. I hid in my dorm, calculating another Feynman diagram because I could, doing what I mastered because I mastered it. But grad students were supposed to discover, not rehash, so I sunk as… Read more →
Mouse, After Traveling
Something mammalian wakes me, rustling around the wastebasket placed too close to my head as if it were an extra pillow where I’d dropped wrappers from sweets I had sworn I wouldn’t buy at the airport, and even as I leap from the blankets not fully awake yet I recognize how neither of us can escape the harm caused by… Read more →
I Was Raised by an Octopus
Not in the National Geographic sense of a greasy floating thing squiggling around in water that you never wanted to get too close to or stab on your plate with a knife, but definitely a many-tentacled being that could rip your skin off in sheets if you tried to sneak out a window, and a ponderous head swiveling around like… Read more →
A Crow’s-Eye View
I’ve been lying in the compost pit trying to get back to my essential elements. The crows give me a curious look but the crows have always given me a curious look like I’m a trinket they can steal and add to their nest. I’ve gotten to an age where I’m often cold so I appreciate the heat from all… Read more →