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  • Physics

    after Stephen Hawking Jimmy Alvarez and Emilio Sanchez and his brother are absent forever, each shot in the head in the park, and so their membership has lapsed with the Latin Kings. Slumped in their car seats, they look as if they drank too much except that their lips are frosted white over pearl and…

  • Little White Sister

    Mama warned me, stay away from white girls. Once I didn’t. So, thirty years too late I’m minding my mama. That’s how it happened. I saw her. Flurries that night and she’s running, bare-legged, wearing almost nothing at all, and the snow’s rising up in funnels, like ghosts, spinning across the street till they whip…

  • Straight and Clear

    i. Between the confluence of the rivers, the smolt twist and die in massive turbines. Liaison between the proliferation, Nusoox and all the commissions, Yowanswickt watches the roll of dice, pitched in bone games, about irrigation, treaty and young, vulnerable fish. Dialogues with usurpers who are loquacious and convinced of the real in terms of…

  • The Weight of Memory

    When they were still young and love was not yet their protection, he fell, though only once, into what he called another woman’s arms. But she understood him, and speaking the language of betrayal, she understood him to mean another woman’s legs, and it was this understanding she was trying to swallow.            If I…

  • Cows

    Even as we speak, there’s a smoker’s cough from behind the whitethorn hedge: we stop dead in our tracks; a distant tingle of water into a trough. In the past half-hour—since a cattle truck all but sent us shuffling off this mortal coil— we’ve consoled ourselves with the dregs of a bottle of Redbreast. Had…

  • from Perma Red

    Bad Ways On the Flathead Reservation you can come to a spot in the road where the wind smells like sulfur, a dark smell, something you think you should be able to leave behind you, but it will be in your clothing and in your shoes. And there will be a darkness in the way…

  • The Human Voice

    All night rain ran down the window in the spare bedroom where I slept; outside, the lime tree’s runneled leaves absorbed wave after wave of the Pacific storm, which, like a riot, had been pre- dicted by the authorities; awake in the smallest hour, I heard a woman’s voice rise and join the weather— my…

  • Roman Sketchbook

    AS As you come and go from a place you sense the way it might seem to one truly there as these clearly determined persons move on the complex spaces and hurry to their obvious or so seeming to you destinations. “Home,” you think, “is a place still there for all,” yet now you cannot…