Her gaze is tipped with curare, her face farouche from the kids’ asylum where ice baths failed to tame her. Her claws are crescent moons sharpened on lightning. She swims through the star-splinters of a mirror and emerges snarling— my were-Mama. She’s a rainforest in a straitjacket. Where she leaps the sky comes alive, unleashed…
1. Picture my mother as a baby, afloat on a waterlily leaf, a nametag round her wrist— Victoria amazonica. There are rapids ahead the doctors call “mania.” For now, all is quiet— she’s on a deep sleep cure, a sloth clings to the cecropia tree, a jaguar sniffs the bank. My mother on her green…
What with the pogroms, the genocide, the ethnic cleansing, the secret massacres, the mass graves, the death camps, the public executions, at last there was nobody left, the country was empty. Survivors who reached the borders became refugees. Rebuked by that silence beyond the mountains, the victors planted willows and in due course the country…
Eastwood as No-Name in A Fistful of Dollars. The town called Apricots is built of whitewashed adobe. Behind the walls are widows, staring their tragic arias. Nothing here flowers or fruits. There is the ringer of the dead-bell, the sprightly coffin-maker. Something looks through the Stranger’s eyes, looking. It is a secret. It is life…
after Camille Claudel And in the end it was easiest to let go of all that vigilance, the endless distaff-to-spindle rigor of your compulsions, and allow the silks to snarl. For a while, perhaps, you struggled to escape, snared like an insect in your own allurements. You had never believed that life was what…
And anywhere at all will do To bring it off, to see it through From soup to nuts via the gods And all the other odds and sods Not needed on the voyage, so Fire the sunset gun: let’s go, A positively final tour Of what we know now as before— Not to presuppose an…
Even now, I still remember the pleading bribery in my mother’s eyes as she held out the piece of silver in her palm— A way figured out of the stress of taking me down to Georgetown to see the England-princess in my unfinished dress. “Which you prefer, to see the princess, or a Whole Shilling…
On the outskirts of Reykjavik I find myself slapping the ass of a thick-piled Viking horse, sending up a plume of dust and gas that all but obscures the scrawl on parchment of a jet plane, sending up a pall the likes of which I don’t recall since a ruse I pulled on my mother….
I am downstairs early looking for something to do when I find my father on his knees at the fireplace in the sitting room sweeping ash from around and beneath the grate with the soft brown hand-brush he keeps especially for this. Has he been here all night waiting to catch me out? So far…
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