The time will come—meanwhile you’ll add more ashes, that dirt in your hand. Goodbye, goodbye, you’ll learn to say it. What you want is dirt on the coffin, ashes in the grave. Not a glimpse, year after year, of someone on the street, turning a corner before I can see that red plaid shirt, torn…
Did I know him? Yes his speed (did I tell on him, turn him in?) fell out of his pocket climbing up my two-story steps—hmmm, what is this? crystal-like, kitcheny, condiment no wonder he talked so fast, eyes switching back & forth, if I sat at his feet with some slow narrative. He was a…
Could you love God in a world without death? Teacher asked. And we children shouted, a bristling forest of raised yearning arms. Yes! No! Depends! We didn’t know the answer, or even the question, just wanted to be admired for alacrity, vehemence prompted by authority. Some of us took the opportunity to punch our neighbors,…
There’s a radio station at the left end of the dial where you can listen to 24 hours of genocide and war crimes; how in the south the election was bought cheap by men in unmarked uniforms; how the contaminated medicine was shipped abroad until babies started being born with deformed spines. —And then the…
The decision had been made the night before, though I’d played very little part in it. We’d been lying in bed and she’d said it had to be done. And because the day had been long and we were tired and a bit drunk, I thought it might not stick, and hoped it wouldn’t. It…
“There is a high risk of losses of lambs and sheep exposed to these conditions.” —Bureau of Meteorology, Western Australia “Cold pastoral!” —Keats I have done two drawings: one of sheep with lambs on a hillside near the old colonial mansion between here and town, and another of sheep dying with their dying lambs on…
My twin’s bomb was packed with glass and a virus. His skin grew wet and dark and wouldn’t heal. I stink like meat, he wrote when he could. When it was clear he wasn’t dying, the VA doctors called him a cosmetic fix. Skin grafts, reconstructive surgery. When he recovered enough to make jokes, he…
Summer is entered through screen doors, and therefore seems unclear at first sight, when it is in fact a mesh of fine wires suspended panewise whose haze has confused the eyes… What if we never entered then— what if the days remained like this, a hesitation at the threshold of itself, expectant, tense, tensile as…
I was as true as the numbers it takes to make a fever, and even if July was a slow-burning ship, I could still find comfort in the scattered spectrum of wind chimes and sun catchers. But now the skyline lies in hangdog silence. Winter is a heavy opal clasped around my neck, and the…
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