Have your babies in a dramatic hurry at 29 weeks, the price of entry to a place people onlywant to leave.Deliver them in the t-shirt you went to bed in. You’ll be unconscious anyway.Wonder why 20 people are in the OR—how many hands does this take?Shake uncontrollably.Fear? Adrenaline? Cold? All of it.Trust the surgeon they call a cowboy. Who better… Read more →
i carry my mirror self like the gift it is — fragile in its limbs, soft beyond reparation, beyond repair. beneath his oblong face, pack of honed molars suppressing a psalm of hope. on the hill of his desires sits a boy at the bed of a river, tossing pebbles across, bobbing as bubbles ripple the surface of the water…. Read more →
Three tornadoes take out the power and I give my mother updates on the hour. There’s another watch, another storm coming. But don’t worry Mom, I’ve prepared as much as I could, sandbags and cans of vegetable mush and enough kush for a blackout. This is the contract we sign, two hundred fifty days of sunshine for front row seats… Read more →
Footnotes to My Dialogue Journal with My Teacher, Third Grade, Spiral Notebook 1. Spiral notebook plastered with animal stickers. Bunny wearing a beret, balancing a palette. Kitten cuddling a giant candy heart. Dog standing upright in a yellow slicker. 2. In the first entry, I wrote about my baby sister who died right after she was born, which is what… Read more →
The short jacket thrives1 in the type of yellow that you won’t add any adjective word in front of, and you could always find it at your first glance2, regardless of where you tossed this outerwear the night before, regardless of who3 and what4 made you toss it. The main color of yellow has been interrupted by the dark-brown stretchy-materialled… Read more →
I turned up that exact snapshot: recognized nobody, nothing, just as it knew not either of me. Police radio chatter & deep calming breaths: step predicts into its next step heel to toe. History to blame: makes whatnot so. You wait in the hall forever for time to be up. The fire door. The search party. Skin, bones & the… Read more →
Six times since 2014, I’ve walked the Ice Sheet. Together with Antarctica, 99% of the Earth’s freshwater ice is in Greenland. We know it’s melting. Oceans rising. Air warming. The planet’s balance is turning like a body in sleep. As the ice retreats, it reveals a landscape of debris at least 2.5 million years old. Rock and sand emerge like illegible… Read more →
After Marina Abramović If given honey, if given a scalpel, what then?Our choices are laid out before us: bread, wine, grapes, a pistol,and a bullet. A child on his father’s shouldersstares over a sea of people. The room busies with murmuringbefore everyone goes mute. The time is ours,the woman is ours. Men in collared shirts begin to choose:a rose, a… Read more →
consisting of phrases found in closed captions, Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, and “Depersonalization: Standing in the Spaces Between Recognition and Interpellation” by Orna Guralnik, PsyD, & Daphne Simeon, MD aligned with the social order, so thoroughly mastered, [men continue indistinct]. a three-dimensional person becomes a mannerism; to carve out a new sovereignty [soft fingerpicking] in which we breathe… Read more →
To say it is or isn’t. To be a toothless cuntless godless ghost. You ask the questions whose answers make the whole night & next morning flaccid. If I could love a stranger half as much as I want to cripple your words I would leave myself for the blue man holding roller skates at the end of the block…. Read more →