Reminds me of early winter—field dressed, dangling from a porch girder like an upside-down garland of roses, no longer animal or drifting hole in a snow-blazed moor. How is it the body knows it deserves the ground before the clouds? The noose almost giving in? Suddenly thawed, dropped in its own shadow, held: un-mothered, sucked…
Sometimes at dusk when the earth gives its sweet breath to the trees, I think how I have taken a stranger’s life and whispered not so much as his name to the asphalt sky. How each year, on my mother’s birthday, I hear the warbled rasp of his breathing and it pushes and draws me…
What they don’t seem to understand is that I like things the way they are. It’s become very fashionable for people to appear on these television shows, these so-called reality programs about people BURIED ALIVE, people DROWNING IN THEIR OWN POSSESSIONS, obese old men surrounded by expired, unrefrigerated yogurt containers and wisp-haired, rail-thin ladies with dead cats rotting underneath piles…
This time the bombs came in the middle of Sunday mass. Leila heard the planes first, screaming from above. Then the first blast shook the entire church, pulled the walls and wooden pews and windows and ceramic-tiled roof off the building and turned them into a rain of fire and ash. Leila didn’t have time…
The first couple of pounds were hard and I cried a lot; I wasn’t used to so little food. I had signed up at one of those clinics, spent a lot of money on diet soup, and got weighed in front of a bunch of other fat people so when I wanted to eat a…
To Yusef Komunyakaa When I rise from the bank the water’s slow as shadow in my steps, thick as blood. The whole river’s secretive, still, dark as roux cooled in the skillet, as rank, as sweet, ancient as catfish, ancienter. The moon’s sifted light clouds rumor to lilies or daffodils, an egret on the…
1. When the brindled cow was five, she got an infected eye. Arlene took her to the vet in Armstead to have the eye examined, perhaps removed. The brindled cow wasn’t worth the vet bill, but she was a pet of sorts. Arlene loaded the cow into the horse trailer, delivered her to the…
I am the only man in the world because I have no tits. I have a permanent hard-on as long as I am tall and it outweighs me. They say that I have horns, hooves, and a tail, but this is a myth or a lie: my forehead is knobbed, my coccyx is protuberant, and…
Amped-up grid lights growl stars onto the hay-baled dirt ring onto blistered chrome and rust-lace, car-shells taped and painted over to resemble shapes of cars. We’re bleachered, gum-shoed, bleached by glare, laughing at ourselves for being here, spilling beer and sponging powdered sugar from our rumpled shirt-fronts, smiling. Rumbles in the air, our guts, the…
No products in the cart.