Quarter-glass in the dawn-light’s mottled hyphen. The risk of it, the resistance. I stitched the mask from lathered skins. Motes of flour in the bakery’s apse. I breathe like the machine I am, I proof the stubborn yeast. Nectar of planished faces articulating the angles: of self, of theology, of the spaces recently occupied by…
Then happiness became an egg that broke across our table. Fragments of shell through which yolk pooled to placemats: bright goopy gold that filled loose napkin folds as if all I could wish for from luck. My three-year-old pulls himself up alongside to mash peas on his tray and meow at my hand and command…
A white cat has come to sit on the backside of slaughter, To sit on a white bull bearing a necklace of pomegranates. The cat has come not as any witness to a crucifixion Or a coronation, not as angel or symbol of some comfort Creature, some benign break in the dying, But as human…
She was old, my mother, and dead now, or so they said, and I could think of nothing but boiling pots of water. Out the window, November’s birds pecking the dry grass. More and more water I boiled, watching it hiss and spit, roil and seethe. She was old, my mother, and…
All I ever needed to bring up with her was cranberries. She brightened no one’s eyes; I befriended her frown. Bogs, she says, when I rhyme fog. Bone-chilling overcast, she affirms damply. Wouldn’t you like to slip away from your burned house and head to the cold coast, even if they have to search for…
I’d bring them home in jars, in my bare hands, or sometimes wound around my arms: garter snakes, with their sleek yellow stripes, dull brown lizards their spiny toes and jagged sides. Once, a baby ringneck snake, no bigger than my pinkie, wearing its thin choker of coral. In Barbados, at my grandparents’, it…
I always wanted a daughter, which is to say, I wanted a better self, flicked from my marrow—made flesh. I wanted this bone-of-my-bones to move in the world, exceptional and unharmed. Not this world. But a world almost exactly unlike it. Same paved streets and street cafés, same slow unfurl of…
Italic Z of snow. A perhaps raptor’s nest beside it in the pine. Families are going in at dusk, voices fading like numbers on used tram tickets run over in the parking lot. Small bag of dog shit placed beside a rusty pole. Sometimes even outdoors there’s a stress you can’t get out of, spinning…
for MW How do you hope to survive? & not just that: was it even the question? By midday the fog was burning off;; screech & call beside the anyway::: ::: the parent osprey had gone out looking for the right fish (did it fear stone?) & bryophytes rested on the soil as…
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