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  • Abstract Barbie Doll Painting

    A pencil is stuck in your back: manifestation of a common practice— doll torture (the flip side of pinning flies). It's this evil innocence we worship in you like a golden laugh. Idol of tacky teenage-hood, devil's workshop of poo-poo magic, R. D. Laingesque schizophrenic peeing on asylum wall, or writing a name in shit:…

  • Massachusetts Three-Liners

    In this form invented by the author, each three-line poem has exactly 17 words. I. VERITAS 1. Harvard's River Such blinding brilliance, mirroring Sol on flow: To see you, Charley, First I must shut my eyes. 2. Harvard's Fog1 You house, fair Harvard, so much—you spawn so little— Bloom. Bees Don't poke in glass flowers….

  • The Lone Night Cantina

    The Lone Night Cantina was not a real cowboy bar. In those places, imagined Annie Wells, in those roadside joints outside of Cheyenne or Amarillo, just off a two-lane highway with pickups made in the good ol’ U.S. of A. parked in the dirt lot, the men angled their sweat-stained Stetsons over the eyes and…

  • I Am Told

    I am told gravity insists. So I lie ass flat on a green deck. The sea comes at me like a sexual spurt. I am my own bicuspid. Bone white, a wave turns in, hits steel like middle C. A man moves his feet from my head, says, I'll leave you alone. I can never…

  • 400-Yard Girls’ Relay

    I was the first and slowest man—for that sort of thing, you called yourself a man. I handed the baton to Rae, who passed it to Sue, and on to Sharlene. We were the four best runners among the girls in our class. Rae got married in high school and had kids. Sue left college…

  • A Night in the Gardens

    There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca . . . . I distinctly remember wondering, stroll- ing the bright and un-blasted streets, why it was that all the other American cities weren't depopulated now that their young people were free once again to get up…

  • In Ignorance

    We wake with darkness pouring Into our mouths, sister sleep With her east-iron links Broken. Priests hunch over us; Unfeeling their words, the scorn that darkens Foreheads. Brother eyes brother, Lizards circling on a white, bare wall. Forgotten, the porcelain tub where children Scouted the soft edges of their bodies, safe In the maternal water…

  • Dream of Ivy

    You know the story of the woman in a turret and how ivy puts its fingers across the moon. And besides, no one could hear. Ivy that grows forever against the dankest part of a wall gnawing gargoyles deep in the belly of the house. I would have lowered my long hair to a lover…

  • The Latest From France

    Déconstruction est passée, as they say on the Champs-Elysées. One mirror facing another inside a mirrored sphere spins scintillations too tiny and brief to illuminate the unetherized body slabbed for autopsy. Deconstruction is reflective, but of what? Of collective despair, some scholars think. Though we each push our own hopes before us like wheel-barrows through…