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  • Quiet Night

    So quiet you can hearthe Archer drawing his bow,the Moon powdering her face,the elegant axle of creation turning.A tiny iridescent frog appearedon the lip of the toilet bowl this morningas if waiting to receive us.He seemed to be the king of somethingyet made no protestas we ushered him outsidein a loose wad of tissueand set…

  • Red Lilies Ghazal

    A chain of crushed nouns has upended my mind.It’s o.k. It’s all right, pretended my mind. A quick cut. A small nick. A surgical touch.O Penthidine, Tramadol, so splendid my mind! Ram drew back the string of King Janak’s great bow,Sita shot through the lifetimes and tended my mind. Monkeys and blossoms, a long metal…

  • Insatiable

    Little brother drinks his neon sadness liquid—no onehas a healthy relationship with Mountain Dew. Large, no ice. That means more pop for his buck. Who knows if he enjoys the stuff anymore. I think it’s less aboutsavoring those extra sips and more about putting offthe empty cup, that undrinkable last bit that rolls around the…

  • The Trial

    February creeps. The date like a pregnant moon circled round on my calendar. But I do not even know what to wish for.   When I tell my oldest friend this, she says, “Sometimes they shit bomb them,” thethey being other inmates; thethem being my father’s kind. She says this from a distance, as if…

  • “On a Scale of 1 to 10,” Said the Nurse, “How Would You Rate Your Pain Today?”

    If 1 is the name of your best friend from sixth grade,which, for no reason, you remember right now,standing in your socks on the cold tile of the examination room and 2 is finding your car in the parking lot laterand noticing how dirty it has become—the back seat litteredwith plastic wrappers and sales receipts—and…

  • Worms

    I remembered that morning because I woke up to such dark. It was my mother who woke me, came into my room, and said I could help earn a little extra money now. She got me a job with her out at the hog farm. She was dressed in comfortable clothes, soft jogging clothes, and…

  • Bible All Out of Order

    One thing’s for sure; in the future, the morgues are going to be full of tattoos.It’s going to be more colorful, and easier to manage:“Hey Jeff, move Dolphin-Shoulder-Girl to Tray Seven.”“And get Mr. Flames-On-My-Neck out for the doc.” In Italy the tabloids are talking about the “Ambulenza di Morte,”The Ambulance of Death;a medic who was…

  • The Endling

    They flew her in from Sweden, and by God, she looked it. Youthful. Leggy. Blond. Eyes like polished stones and features sharp as an army knife. She’d volunteered. And for what? At first I didn’t know. I’d never been to the Galápagos. Hell, never been farther south than Tijuana. Livy and I had stumbled across…

  • Recast, Again

    You are your father’s broad back                         re-writ in small script. Your feet, like his,grasp the soil, confident      the planet will never spin too fast                     to throw you off. I never was so sure. I spent most of my childhood watching                the clouds                move while I stayed still.                           In this way I was always an observer….