With your brother nepenthe you fell through ashen snow his eyes colored a deep caged absolve lifted you spirits green pigeons clawed your lone pant leg intent to fly sexless and regenerative wind in your ear a meditative gait in its black rubber room three laughing figures liplessly drain an impotent effigy of its sombre…
Althea kept a list of the things she could live without—perfumed soaps, clean rugs, cats. It was a long list. She added to it from scraps she wrote on when she thought of them. Every fortnight or so she gathered up the scraps and in her ancient and exquisite longhand added them to her…
My aunt was upset by lesbians: Her sister, her sister’s lover, in particular. She imagined them, I think, giving each other Head over and over, though from what I knew —And I knew plenty—that couple made love With roughly the same frequency As did Auntie and Uncle Snort. They All had plenty to worry about,…
He eats in silence as frost plumes at the panes and stars tighten, teeth marks on the freezing sky. His boots stand in snow water, melting by the wood stove that he burns hot to husk his legs of cold. The fire bumps, drops, cracks in the stove. His wife and daughters’ talk goes louder…
Not far from San Diego steel ship containers packed with jeeps sit unopened and someone I know very well stands on the boulevard, surrounded by the pink and white stucco walls outside my window suspended in this moment between breathing out and breathing in the men and women at Camp Pendleton relax their arms…
—Plato, Republic The cold call of the cold to the cold Follows itself to the moon, To the edge of the storm, to the fold in the fold In the shrouds of the fallen-too-soon. The call of the cold to the never-held, The sung-over, the one-by-one Follows the moon to the world where the world…
April Owen shows up at my flat around midnight. He doesn’t knock, but I spot him waiting in lurk beyond the screen door. Outside, the rain jumps like pixies on the floodlit blacktop. His hair is soaked and his boots are muddy. “Come on in,” I say, and he does, slowly. His eyes have that…
for R. Voisine His father, two brothers, and me, we turned off our saws for a rest of water and cake. Thirsty, he stopped, walked over and the loader’s back gate yawned and slipped its catch, threw him down onto a fresh stump, still that pink-white wet. I scooped him up. Blood fell on the…
That morning—a humid morning, early Spring, gray birds feeding on muddy lawns, the sound of a chain saw nearby, a red shirt tied to a battered tree, the empty smoke-streaked sky— That morning they held him in the green car and negotiated his punishment. They blindfolded him. His hand was held to something very hot…
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