Article

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • At the Moment of Beginning

    1. A cage can be a body: heart in the nightquieted slightly; mind, a stopped top.Clock spring set. Hand in motion.The fact of the hollowed nothing head. How did we come to this? Inch by inch.I was born, borrowed from the beast;I was now property in a countrywhere chain reigns—the empire city of I. 2….

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Code Blue

    Iris wants to walk on the beach with her feet in the ocean and the sun on her face. She wants to eat greasy hamburgers and drink pints of beer and throw peanut shells on the floor. She wants to wear high heels, polish the silver, dance the tango, bake a cake, plant peonies, daydream,…

  • Diamond Haiku

    Major or minor, says Baseball Diamond Sutra, what does it matter? The boys of summer know that nirvana is just one inning away. Deep in the outfield, a glove reaches toward sky— fireflies blink on. Over the bleachers, a blank scoreboard announces no wins, no losses.

  • Introduction to Barbara Perez

    When Barbara Perez moved from San Antonio to Boston—a city she’d never visited—to join a new program’s first MFA class, she revealed a certain willingness to take risks. Her work radiates the same willingness, using logic twined with metaphor to explore passion’s depths. In poems like “Bottle,” mindfulness is the natural way to express feeling…

  • Run

    This is a story about pretending. Imagine my father, a boy, not the old man who bought this shuttered house I have just cleaned out, here at the tropical tip of Florida, but a boy of six, seven, eight, in a one-room school with snow-bent eaves, with another black eye, another chipped tooth, pretending he’s…