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  • The Year

    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 isdirt on the coffin, ashes in the grave.Not a glimpse, year after year, of someone on the street,turning a corner before I can seethat red plaid shirt, torn sleeve. Tender 26,bad number, risky year…

  • Courbet is a Desperate Man

    Did I know him? Yes his speed(did I tell on him, turn him in?)fell out of his pocket climbing upmy two-story steps—hmmm,what is this? crystal-like, kitcheny,condiment no wonder he talkedso fast, eyes switching back & forth,if I sat at his feet with some slownarrative. He was a chef—an excuse. Did I go to the porn…

  • Midwinter

    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 beadmired for alacrity, vehemence prompted by authority. Some of ustook the opportunity to punch our neighbors, or, in our…

  • Scotch Tape

    There’s a radio station at the left end of the dialwhere 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 abroaduntil babies started being born with deformed spines. —And then the big conspiracies: how the…

  • Up Here

    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…

  • Weather Warning to Sheep Graziers

    “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 sheepwith lambs on a hillside near the old colonialmansion between here and town, and anotherof sheep dying with their dying lambson the same hillside in bad weather….

  • IED

    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…

  • First Sight

    Summer is entered through screen doors,and therefore seems unclearat first sight, when it is in facta mesh of fine wiressuspended panewisewhose 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, tensileas lines that crisscross each otherin a space forever latentwhere…

  • Winter Drift

    I was as true as the numbers it takesto make a fever, and even if Julywas a slow-burning ship, I could stillfind comfort in the scattered spectrumof wind chimes and sun catchers. But now the skyline lies in hangdogsilence. Winter is a heavy opal claspedaround my neck, and the city skulkssilver-haired and ornery, and oh—…