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Squalor

In the beginning, I thought a great deal about death and sunlight, et cetera, cramming each syllable that I could cram into the seconds and brackets allotted me, all for the memoir that wouldn’t be written, all for the movie that wouldn’t be made. Look at the way I ran after you, arms stirring dust…

Don’t Think Like the Mountains, They’re Nothing Like the Future

If only our children were colts, and sensible enough to be good at one thing. Running. Jumping some. Looking adorable. They would deserve our devotion. Think crepe myrtle, nudged after a brief rain. Think zealots. Think ocean waves, if we’d enough sense to give them unique personalities. Everywhere you look, willfulness. Bountiful willfulness. And these…

Consequence

I enter my name into a search engine. There are 3,700 results. The word torture appears in most of them. I read the blogs. I read the comments that follow. I find more blogs. I pretend those don’t bother me either. I check e-mail, thirty-eight new messages. Mr. Fair, I’m not at all sure why…

Practice for Being Empty

I’m only a human. Always is only in me as long as I last. What do I want? Don’t ask. We forget who we are. Conformists all alone looking for a fake mirror and finding it in some poker nobody sitting across the aisle. To be like some other and feel that. While I am…

Days of Oakland

Now and then, you heard the copters Flying in search of inmates who’d escaped. Mostly, though, it was quiet. At night, outside, The cats would fight and fuck and knock shit down, The couple next door would simmer in heat Or bitterness. Sometimes you saw them, In the window-glass, appearing Like quarter-moons through mist. There…

Palace

When they run out of meat                men disappear. I chew         my hair, a kind of fullness that is kind, a thread                soup. A nest gathers         its strands inside me. The dead hatch, translucent-eyed,                wire-boned, small         whistling through beaks. We share our (secret)                feast, miles of hair to keep         us warm. I rock on my heels…

Crime Scene

You expected to see blood dripping through his clothes                                        —writing prompt from a student so you kept your distance so you closed your eyes so you ran as fast as you could through that garbage strewn alley, down that street lined with dilapidated cars. You did not pause to consider the wound—who or what caused…