Article

  • Israel

    Steam lifting from the highways, ascendingto 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 madethe world a brighter…

  • Practice for Being Empty

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

  • 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…

  • 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 days it’s the children you see playing…

  • 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 in the middle                            of…

  • 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…

  • Crime Scene

    You expected to see blood dripping through his clothes                                            —writing prompt from a student so you kept your distanceso you closed your eyesso you ran as fast as you couldthrough that garbage strewn alley,down that street linedwith dilapidated cars.You did not pause to considerthe wound—who or what caused it.You gave him no consideration at all.You were…

  • My Opera Glasses

    This audience is dressed in the old clothes and humiliations I in my mask, powder woman, sick of everything, my own failings most of all. Someone I heard jumped into the pit the orchestra, during the third act and landed between harp and horn, mangled like a doll at the bottom of a well. I…