Article

  • Lines on the Pathetic Fallacy

    The hurricane’s advance team of breezes administers a poll to my oak trees. The author, having scented disaster, having been awake for hours, advises his trees not to answer. Telephones trill on nightstands, requiring weary authorities to sit on the edges of their beds with their heads in their hands as instructed by disaster movies….

  • Cartography

    I’m dumb about the world. To me, it always looks haunted, impoverished—especially in snow, which returns it to black and     white. And sometimes I look and see nothing— but the elementary smoke rising from a human village, overpopulated, and yet undermade. A woman from there is walking along the side of     the road to the next village…

  • Introduction

    Grizzly bears, electric bears, fire bears—these three are the most dangerous bears, my three-year-old daughter informs me. I don’t know how she knows what she knows, yet she knows many things. Lately it is all about bears. Electric bears? I ask her. I’ve never seen an electric bear. If you go into his cave, he…

  • Lines on Sublation

    Torchlight splinters in a crystal chandelier. Rebels have taken the palace. Yet, your mind sleeps safely in its skull. But, Sigmund Freud sets a fly in it. “We are made such that we can derive intense enjoyment only from contrast and little from a state of things.” Though the poli-sci major says that’s just one…

  • ὁδός [hodos]

    Greek. 1. A traveled way; a road. 2. A traveler’s way; journey. The idea of a woman as a road has a certain appeal: I think of setting off along myself, boots sucking softly at the mud. The Greeks imagined the uterus hiking up and down. The booted empty uterus, sniffing for blood. And the…

  • Gondwana

    I was on the bus, on my way to see Dad, trying to distract myself by looking at all the cruddy people and their misery, but it was a total no go, I couldn’t concentrate; and then I was standing there in front of him saying (just like I’d rehearsed), I’m really sorry to interrupt…

  • Gut-Bomb

    What separates four pounds of ground chuck elk from four pounds of ground chuck beef is two spoonfuls of black pepper, parsley, and seasoned salt. Source: the group home cookbook. When the game warden dragged a bull off the autumn highway or hauled a warm-bellied cow some poacher left to rot, he phoned us. I…

  • The Dark Constellations

    The Inca gave the lightless places names. Fox, toad, serpent. A black llama with faint eyes. The space between my hands and the keyboard. I have forgotten how     the sonata begins. Photo printed in black and white, so that the wine looks clear. The mirror in a dark room, waiting for monsters. In the city sky,…

  • Often, Common, Some, and Free

    Dear, neither of us has anymoney. Let’s saywe leave that field open, as inwe don’t complete the form. I see nothing heresays it is required.Maybe this is the other kindof field. Grass, etc. That makes sense to me.Dear, neither of us has anymoney. Let’s saythere’s an Adirondack chair, the affordable plastic kind.Maybe those are rubber.Maybe…