A large steel knife hovers above Main Street. All night it goes house to house, poking its glowing eye through each roof in its turn. It looks in on the accountant, sleeping fingers tabulating debt on a quilt. The chief of police is safely asleep with his secretary. It was never about love. Grandmother’s in…
Dear __________wise, Dreamt you pregnant again, growing further from our days of games. I muttered like a dreaming animal, legs twitching every now and then. If only I might reach up to Mother’s version of heaven or its replica. I wasn’t meant for such a small body, good only for being mistaken for a child’s….
What ghost threw my hand across my face? He roamed my sleep in that room dark under pines. Another cried softly for an hour, till comforted. Lakes, mansion, woods, studios— all of it loss and the love of art. Mornings I’d stare at an old story: the touring car draped in a tarp,…
We would walk with it into the open Look down and read the shadows Of the clouds passing over it The birds sang dial tones The infected birds Gray sentences uncurled As we smoked our manuscripts The cattle went mad Their blue lips smiling At a sign in the distance We slaughtered the distance It…
By perspective, I meant how eventually every landscape wouldn’t have to include defilement, or any other outrage, getting smaller each time we looked back on it, or forgot not to. An armload of millet and sunflowers could, despite the fact of July, just like that, turn the room October. I believed suffering happened…
All Winter I’ve Waiteds. The Then You Came Backs. Wands. Wounds. Tarot Cups. Lisps. Strapless Dresses. Sylvia Tears. Conjugations. Anne Frank’s Looms. Another Man Done Gone. Kleenex After Sex. Mrs. Manner’s Accidents. The How Funerals. The Greedy Toos. Freaks. The What Happens Every Afternoon. The Purple Spot on My Neck. The Eye Tricks. Children’s Bibles….
sweet, waxy smell, and opaque film it dries to a kleenex on the thumb, a coal-black residue it lifts, the watery depth of tarns, corroding vapors, killer oxygen, pure proficiency, what it should be, neutral as a crease, or a smart salute, or alignment, the meditational boots under the slow, circular spit, the mindless attention,…
Snow like the cold lard of falling stars strikes the windshield. A small thermos of tea rolls around in the glove compartment. I sneeze. Up in the black trees, the moon and the snow are repeatable in the long spine of a woman who has opened her high window. It is her signal to the…
They say my great-uncle read foreign books in a mud house in Nanking, plowed his twenty acres, listened to rare birds, disobeyed the tides’ yes and no. One day he knelt in the street, sign around his neck that said: Traitor. Little Red Book spread like wax over him, even beech trees turned. He labored…
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