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Hieroglyphic

June, I don't have to use magic burned into roots of      antelope words to tell you what I mean, when I say I met myself in the      Egyptian Room just a few days before my thirty-sixth birthday. It wasn't      vertigo, though vertigo is common in the bowels of the concrete monster.      Crossing Fifth Avenue was…

Flames

I met Kazmir at Mrs. Malek's. He was a couple years older than I was, though only a grade ahead of me. His blond hair was just growing back from the baldy sour they'd given him after the school nurse found lice, and the deep, white-welted scar commemorating a fall from a second-story window when…

Trinity Street

It stands like a resentment. The mind's city unfolded to a huge, discordant image. Recollection closes in on the ancient buildings, the fractured curbs, and in all the places you might have known, women walk in the opposite direction. Onward to their first novel, the fictional release. I look through a great eye, seeing more…

The Land of Fuck

“Here I was begging the Muse not to get me in troble with the powers that be, not to make me write out all those ‘filthy’ words, all those scandalous, scabrous lines, pointing out in that deaf and dumb language which I employed when dealing with the Voice that soon, like Marco Polo, Cervantes, Bunyan…

Siqueiros: Our Countenance

Like through a telescope Planted in a fresh grave, I see through your nostrils, Darkly, the more distant past. Stubborn your horse skull That knows of the price on its head. Like a plate empty for days We stretch our hands out of the frame. A bloody yoke swims through The egg white of the…

Cutting Bait

Jimmy returned from summer camp in love with fishing. He swam, played baseball, took riflery and even horseback riding, but passed his best days dangling a five-pound cat-gut line in the cold, blue lakes of Wisconsin. He was sad when camp ended and he said good-bye to Uncle Marv, the counselor who taught him fishing,…

The Effluvial Mood

When I am positive that nobody loves me, I despise all musical instruments. I can't endure vacuum cleaner attachments. I hate Yeats, my mother, and all the attention Jesus got. I avoid, perhaps hate, great black people. When nobody loves me, I am positive of it. I devise an impossible Fahrenheit. A heat that could…

Sad Rite

Because I was empty my body got me a child, the small idea of a child— some pearly cells and light. I thought of it all night. It still lacked hands or a face with which to fill its hands, or another, lovelier face to fill its heart. Because I tend to take myself apart,…