Can I leave now? is all a teenage client monotones again and again in our first session together. I can only help if you talk to me is what I’m supposed to say to him. Last night I played solitaire and didn’t cheat, stacked my red cards, stacked my black, as…
Young, therefore vain & wingless, he lets his father tie a blue thread around his chest. It is before the famous tragedy, the fall. Before the imminent sea. The coast still composed in subdued hues & regimented patterns. The abstraction of waves has yet to be mutilated by a scream. Human position yet to be…
The cattle dog sniffs around for something to chew & I get it, I do, the small snuffbox, the paper matches sulfuring inside my belly, reaching out for whatever wet thing will not burn nevertheless must burn. One morning, buds on the branches as bloodlings & another morning green, verdant fucking green swooshing in the…
The Japanese maple has left her red-handed prints all over town— guilty of fall and of falling. Even Eve in her fig leaves was not arrayed as one of these— as fallen woman, lady in red with each painted finger as pointed as a scarlet letter A. Everyone’s always looking for the luminous,…
we held a slave auction in class today— probably not a state-sanctioned component of AP U.S. History. but Mr. S made a block out of the front-row desks, cordoned it off with backward-facing chairs. he shame-forced Tony Miller above us and introduced him as “item #5.” he’d prepared a catalog: a one-sided sepia sheet with…
In some dreams it is possible to visit Uruk and to be its king as I did sensing all along I was a bad king predisposed to impatience and affronted by impertinence and I know now what I really needed was a good friend of the woods to teach me things Yes that’s what…
It is always there, the blurry dot, the mark, so easy to dismiss, between you and the life you’re focused on, though more distinct with white behind it: a blowing curtain, a wedding gown, while pinning bed sheets on a line, a blank wall in a waiting room, and, late in life, while leaning on…
I tie my hat—I crease my shawl (522) —Emily Dickinson is carried crown first through light that hums. Her country is built of two rooms: need and desire. Birds rarely come near. She cannot see her shoes or the tops of buildings or the moon. She wonders if she is kind. She is as…
From the Museum of Failed Masters Here you will feel no ecstasy, no bright imperative to weep, or to give thanks, or to endure. Instead, we offer solace in what’s gaudy, saccharine, timid, tame: in trees rigidly perfect, Christs with too-white teeth, a sunset blushing at its own excess. The portraits here preserve…
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