I’m hanging out and on, on a froggy Saturday with my friends Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and So On, stimulisting in the O room, motivated by the jukebox of haunted songs. Here, when it gets dark, it gets very late and as cold as the sibyled voice invented by insomnia, in the pseudonymous syntax used by…
I sit on the porch tonight, smoking my last cigarette, savoring it the way a crow at the edge of the highway feeds until the last second, hopping a little dance on the carcass. The trees are stark, the branches hover, ready to sprout in this warm feast of air. I would like to feast…
The father took the children for long walks on Sundays because he imagined they shared his enthusiasm for the flat fields of the Beauce in summer, with the light clouds drifting across a pale sun, the hawthorn hedges flecked with fragile white flowers, and the edges of the wheat stained with red poppies. But the…
Would you know a saint if you saw one? Say you’re on the delivery table, legs drawn up For each agonizing push, while everyone else is poised To welcome forth your frightened protégée— When, instead, a smiling light slowly issues out From your dark interior, assembling itself Like a mirage hovering above the linoleum floor—…
—from the Inuit tale The Man Who Was a Mother A man and a woman couldn’t have any children. No one knew whose fault it was. This couple was unhappy and the butt of jokes. The man sucked on his wife’s breasts. The woman cradled her husband in her arms. But pretending about babies wasn’t…
He could appreciate all The explosion accomplished, The tools they handed him, the manifold tools And their manifold applications. As I was starting to say—the explosion . . . A pungent lawlessness in the air, Like sheep ablaze. He found the barrenness Quite attractive, and said so, So that everyone heard, could hear, But not…
for my father 1. Today Today, this moment, speechlessly in pain, He…
I am ashamed as I try to sleep, counting the wounded and the dead in this old day’s news, the grieving ones they leave behind. Counting stones and bullets, averted needs, the pretty breaths of my family beside me, counting on a world that I don’t trust to keep my children safe. What was I…
—suggested by John Searle’s thought experiment My one bulb may cast more shadows than light (the corners are always lost) but it proliferates in the red and black lips of my four thousand six hundred twenty-three lacquered trays, and I can see well enough to do my job. The room is compact. I can reach…
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