Article

Last Class

Thus what we’ve learned is that our greatest poets were death-obsessed loners who seldom enjoyed the pleasures of lovers despite living in a constant state of sexual excitation. They started as revolutionaries and atheists, or they went to Harvard and voted Republican and mowed the yard. The night sky was starry and told them stories….

Engraving

Climbing to retrieve my son’s ball in a neighbor’s yard, I caught my wedding ring on the fence and nearly ripped my finger off. Fifteen years ago, my wife’s name was engraved inside by a jeweler friend of my wife’s cousin in Zagreb. Blood spurted, as I desperately tried to unhook myself before I passed…

from The Blank Missives

Dear __________wise, Dreamt you pregnant again, growing further from our days of games. I muttered like a dreaming animal, legs twitching every now and then. If only I might reach up to Mother’s version of heaven or its replica. I wasn’t meant for such a small body, good only for being mistaken for a child’s….

People Walking in Fog

They try to watch themselves, drifting in a white sigh, the boats and trees, and themselves, too, when they think of it, spun from sheets of gauzy droplets with which to tar the morning white and walk upon it. The horizon yawns. The earth is liquid. They can feel it, and not just it but…

Microphone Fiend

The child freestyles in the shower, battling yellow tiles with a steam-heavy tongue.                        Siblings can wait while s/he rhymes the hot water to an end. Braggadocio and bubblegum toothpaste blend, beatless. S/he spits and spits and spits until words harden like lime crust on the spray head. Have to get the neck into it—flexing…

Rock Deaths

Ham sandwich, food poisoning, own vomit. Plane crash. Car crash, motorcycle crash, bicycle crash. Slit wrists. Suicide by shotgun blast, suicide by hanging. Carbon monoxide poisoning, leap from hotel window, leap in front of subway train. Natural causes. Overdose of pills. Heart disease. Double suicide with mother. Brain tumor, defenestration, erotic asphyxiation. Victim of hit…

Brasso

sweet, waxy smell, and opaque film it dries to a kleenex on the thumb, a coal-black residue it lifts, the watery depth of tarns, corroding vapors, killer oxygen, pure proficiency, what it should be, neutral as a crease, or a smart salute, or alignment, the meditational boots under the slow, circular spit, the mindless attention,…