It fell to Kyle to kill the chickens. On Saturday before dawn, while Audrey was still asleep, he put on an old t-shirt and jeans and headed out to the coop in the backyard, hedge clippers in hand. It was a cloudless, cool morning, but though the horizon was still dark, the hens were already…
I have read enough about the fundamental complexity of all things, down to the very protons and neutrons, to feel at ease saying this: Beauty disciplines. I know my two-word sentence is not intelligible by conventional standards. I hope by means of it to move a little beyond these standards and to begin to justify…
I. Monsters “Pink is the color for girls,” Kiera says, so she and Ava cut their palms and let their blood drip into a shallow bowl filled with milk, watching the color spread slowly on the surface, small red flowers blooming. Ava studies Kiera. How she holds her hand steady—as if used to slicing herself…
Taller than a manpitched from the earthgarbled needleblackened nowits volute screedbee- and beetle-riddenup and down betweenthe un-sprung buds, the wildefficient feel ofsmockedrabbit-skinnedexplosionspoised so slowlyon its undertakingthat it was so longbeing truethe cold and the craftlesswas not craftspotting the nichesthe leaves thexanthene core.
Make your deadness real to me now.Why should you be always so realand so near to me? I should know that you don’t know meanymore. In every sunI close my eyes and see you everywhere inside me. What does deadmean? Are there shadesof, different ways of being dead? Deadwith the damp smell of lichen, deadreally…
Your body—not disappeared into the grave but into blizzarding swan-colored lines of lace—holding something like your shape. And just like flesh you open, absorbingeach stray iridescence, each veil of updraft, upswirl, white noon scattering your edges, you’resomething like a dress I can’t put on. I am buildingyour body, building a mind to move throughevery curve…
My dead mother is more beautifulthan yours. My dead mother will always be more beautifulthan yours. Even her deadnessis more beautiful.
and everyone was there to watch youdie. We offered youpopsicles, ice, a sponge we’d dab on yourlips. We crowded you,stroked your legs, your hair, tried to keep youkempt without hurting, disturbing you, prodding youuntil your eyes, when they opened, couldn’thold us. We hated that, hated yourstillness, your days of stillness, noteating, not speaking, and we…
Of your things now, onemore of the things that survived you. I wear your long gray herringbone coat intolong gray days, returning alwaysto your other objects: drawers of good silverware, spices, framed madonnas who look at me, wondering what I have done. When you said you were afraid you were going to die,I said Everyone…
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