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Wild Through the Sea

Remember the night it snowed in a place we were told would never snow and like two shadows cast by a lamp standing in the presence of a Greater we walked the beach the sand’s grit limpid the expanse of what I didn’t know endlessly swallowing the floes the ocean has always been immutable and…

Small Before-Church Poem

Laughing at the thought of lack of pleasure as a pleasure— monuments not yet objects, a waltz not for dancing but for labor— and having slogged through pollen, considerable weeds and fallen power lines to be here, I have more to say about this day than of the year. Blasphemy’s part of the Logos too,…

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 wrong with 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…

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…