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  • Sing to Me

    Chipped ivory, wire into the wall, a hole for headphones— This piano came from that one, the first piano, a dark wooden body we sheltered in, a father broad as an ark. I could float alone in it, go back and forth, E-flat, E, and slip between tipped sky and dirty penny taste in the…

  • (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 mouth…

  • The Queen of Truth

    If torture is the Queen of Truth then what is the King of Truth? Could it be the Black Dog, ennui, accidia, can the King rule by the weight of the ink (oh, I pray not the pixels!) on an execution order? Could the King be numbed by dum-dum fever? Could the King be a…

  • (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 attention. After awhile…

  • in the blizzard

    the horses are filthy in their winter coatsgrubby and mattedmanes mended with haythey flicker between snows like medieval ordersof spiritual pilgrims; seenand invisible—unseen and realthe blizzard continues and the world is the windyour eyes close to slitsinside the drift and howlthe horses aren’t yours / not even broken to ridestill they help you get homeas…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…