New Terrain
Beth Kephart (a slideshow)
The Landscape Does Not Regrow
For E. On days where my body turns brittle, flakes off in your hands thin as bread-shell, can you still hold it? When the wall in our new house resembles the one I stared down while I was drilled years ago and I disappear, retreat into this lonely grotto of skull, even then? Cold night air pinpricks my joints, and… Read more →
This City is a Pig Farm
This city is a pig farm but you are young, so you don’t mind; to you, it’s merely dirty work, and dirty work makes for an interesting story, and being gay, in your mind, is being a body made of interesting stories. You don’t know any better, yet, but this city is a pig farm, filled… Read more →
Don’t bite the hook
Extraordinary things can flourish in pondwater, in my stagnation where festering scum glows green. Coursing the perimeter my feet catch dust half-heartedly getting somewhere implausible and balled up. When there’s nowhere else to deflect the loss of clean water and no avoiding the neon algae spreading from the shore then my self-inquiry is self-elision is the risk of not saying… Read more →
Thirty Years Gone
I don’t know who that was with river rocks for eyes, that head of antlers and the grass of fallow stream banks loose behind his ears. He never breathed the exhaust of this actual life or drove home before sunset, preferring mayflies at dusk or scribbling symbols by car light on the shoulders of gravel roads. I return there once… Read more →
How to Paint Clouds
They take Wednesdays off. Siblings appearing out of nowhere to take your house from you. They’ve roadblocked the traffic circle, the railroad crossing. The geese with a very small alphabet. Threads plucked, scabs, a scar on my forehead. An envelope breathing air into sound. Floating is remaining alive, & when we travel we are always leaving home. Evaporation is an… Read more →
Types of Life
The hats tell us where we end up, a myth of hair. I am trying to bring flowers to the hospital equipment. How machines whimper without air. How birth is an airplane window & forests below. A lake full of manuscript pages. And so much alive this poem will never see. I don’t trust the moon wrapped in tin foil…. Read more →