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  • Like This

    The storm breaks leaving the limbs far away from being what happened, the world, like this. Wind still refuses to choose between the plumes of grasses and the roofs of the big houses. The agony of nails prying loose. The swing unhinged. The fleshy roots of an ash exposed like the paintings of Death embracing…

  • Perfidy

    A few sounds, over and again, grip me through this     drunken mess. I walk to the oblivious road, gone and done for. A few beats of my pulse splinter through the plates     of my skull. The gun blast, I do not know where the bullet hit or the depth of my wound. My…

  • 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…