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  • Wild Through the Sea

    Remember the night it snowedin a place we were told would never snowand like two shadows cast by a lampstanding in the presence of a Greaterwe walked the beach the sand’s grit limpidthe expanse of what I didn’t know endlesslyswallowing the floes the ocean has always beenimmutable and dumb has always carried onpast my limitations…

  • Small Before-Church Poem

    Laughing at the thought of lackof pleasure as a pleasure—monuments not yet objects,a waltz not for dancing but for labor— and having slogged through pollen,considerable weeds and fallenpower lines to be here, I have moreto say about this day than of the year. Blasphemy’s part of the Logos too,like wanting the light my way. Towersdisappear…

  • Bajadas

    ba·ja·da noun 1: a steep curved descending road or trail 2: an alluvial plain formed at the base of a mountain by the coalescing of several alluvial fans Origin 1865-70, Americanism: from the Spanish feminine past participle of bajar: to descend December 20 Santiago quit the academy yesterday. We were on our way into town…

  • The Forever Rachel

    The Forever Rachel chiseled into a tree and many years later written in the water of a pond. Forever Rachel in her mesh hikers, stepping over a sleeping policeman. Hair under her arms. Hair on her legs. Wielding a picket sign every other day. She made her prom dress out of old newspapers and during…

  • Always One More Way

    I was packing up my stuff to go home when Valdez stepped on a forgotten land mine in the field near our barracks. Carver and I ran outside and watched a faraway cloud of dust and Valdez particles float back down to the ground. “Shit,” I said. “Who even knew there were mines out there?”…

  • The Mirror

    Translated by Andrew Wachtel I walked ahead, there was no other path.Doors cut us off from the past: mama was aging,the tree burned up, and something was wrongwith the sick man’s chest.Everywhere I went a beggar woman followed,with a belly bloated like a globe,but she didn’t ask for cash or to sing a song.Like some kind…

  • Restitution

    Monte set the glass down and raised the gun, waved it around like a kid with a toy. Elgin was across the table, his hands in his lap. “Whatta you say I just shoot you right here and now?” Monte said, like he might or might not be joking. But then Elgin shot first, a…

  • The Disturbance

    In the first full summer of our marriage, when Karen and I were expecting our first child, someone tried to break in one night through the back door. Before that, I’d been going on a lot of solitary night walks. It was one of the hottest summers on record. We were renting the ground floor…