Article

Piece by Piece

1.          Construction When the road was not a road but a flooded mouth of broken teeth husband and wife parked at the spring-swollen dam. Above a chorus of peepers they bickered the radio news unloading their haul: soft pine, tongue, groove. They shouldered the wood under a catchpenny moon. A quarter mile down they filled…

Flux

Anthony Baron steps outside and takes a deep breath. The air is fresh with the scent of loamy soil and budding trees. The snow, except for a few icy patches, has melted. At last it is spring. It was a long, hard winter. For months it seemed as if all he did was dig out…

(why your room has a door)

It’s not the shore; it’s the ocean that opens. Devil, make a mountain of me for the water to dwell         against. I became aware of my       methods and the methods changed me. Soldier, you make my body a map on the floor. It’s what the door is for—         hesitation—a hand that wants to be a…

in the blizzard

the horses are filthy in their winter coats grubby and matted manes mended with hay they flicker between snows like medieval orders of spiritual pilgrims; seen and invisible— unseen and real the blizzard continues and the world is the wind your eyes close to slits inside the drift and howl the horses aren’t yours /…

The Adventure Family

Many years ago, I decided to make an adventure movie about my family that had nothing to do with me. The family would live in the trees and swing from room to room making the leaves whistle, making the birds flustered. They would live there all year round, even in the snow, and when it…

(ode)

When we looked at the circle, we felt powerless. Earth or fist our hands are bound together    in protest. Bare my throat, I said, in a faceful of sand. I swallowed too much water. The property    is private, the way we’ve come to think of grief as nonviolence, absence,    lack, fasting as an act of…

After Grass and Long Knives

Suspect enthusiasm— having eaten pins before— but that’s what keeps one quiet, that’s what makes one stay. Empty is just the first temporal name after something smaller sat there is gone. Then that space regains its height and wild. Let let lovers be light thoughts, just touch remembered in some not unkind way. It was…

Israel

Steam lifting from the highways, ascending to the heavens beneath the misery of commute, fires below the pavement. I have become a better driver by the standards of Houston. I will hurt somebody if they deserve to be hurt. No, OK, no, but I’m an expert in menace. All this blinding steel and glass, we’ve…

energy

Sometimes, after snow, you find yourself in a field of laughing gulls shaken and spat in a mass kill and your boots are the only noise. It’s like a bad joke I cannot resist telling. Enough. Hunger is plenty. Everything is dangerous. New moon, the red fox is out walking. Extinction is nothing to the…