What is this thing that must be won by experience?It has me walking on sidewalks next to myself, bothselves watching women and men coming toward us,the fruit vendors and lovers— Why does everything occur in pairs, the glanceand the glance averted, the gaze and the gazereturned? A woman drops her scarf and anotherreaches toward it….
—from Definitions Freudenschreck, or “intense pleasure-fright”—leave it to the GermansTo coin a word for the fleeting sense of being seizedBy such an inexplicable joy it verges on terror.Or maybe it’s inexplicable terror pretending to be joy.Also, a physical phenomenon: neurologists say the amygdalaGlows red as a jack ball whether subjects gaze at images of planetesimals…
1.Woke up early to write, killed flies instead. 2.In the pot, I boil bones with huājiāo and fennel, attempting toreproduce a past taste. The result is a gray diluted broth, ghost enoughto conjure. 3.On Facebook you can tag a picture as “my grandmother.” If you hover your mouse over the blue tag of “my grandmother,”…
You will want to go back. Notright away, perhaps, not as you runtowards the train’s open doors and not during the nightmilesin which the distance collapsesunder the wheels into ordinary darkness. And maybe not while laid acrossthe row of empty airplane seats,the young Chinese couple helping you order food the first to witnessyour foreignness and…
—after Wrecked Archive B-45HqDHfqp by Patty Paine I am inching along the Mackinac Bridge, passenger in a van.Through the frosted window, the sun is a yellow explosion,blown open, its blood a sulfur-yellow sheen that pools in thedistance on top of Lake Huron. The clack-clack-clack of thetires over the bridge’s steel grates sounds like one of my…
—after Wrecked Archive B-VAYKjKGqG image by Patty Paine Initially, I think the clown is in charge, because he is tweetingnothing but commands—no salutations, no jokes or puns orother clown-speak—but I am wrong. “I know who all of youpunks are!” he yells, shaking his fist, clutching a list that hethinks identifies the children, but he is wrong….
The world returns a bit on the fifthAlone Together day. Amina’s teacher sends assignmentsover email. A friend calls with good news:Eileen got the Good Letter, the happy onefrom the school she wanted. We return to the endless taskof freeing the front yard from weeds, and neighborscome by and stand at a distance, saying dubiously,“It looks all right,” or…
how much of the hand is fist my father asks— for him it’s halfwhat you’d expect—the tape’s temper between splint and split knuckles:symbol’s useless rigor; the long ride home— for the boy with the torn lip,it’s half what you’d expect bleaching blood off someripped…
maybe it’s too early for glow, slow asa cloud slung like what a soldier might carryhome—I’ll never understand whymy mother, for example, carrieda set of latrine tools, mosquito netting,a cat that wouldn’t leave her sideher infidelities, she carried thosetoo, like volcanic stonesthat which impossibly formed insidethe open mouth of mountains of whatone might choose to…
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