For John Ashbery, in thanks We are long-lived, with bodies that tend to outlast the mind. But not you, Tootsie Roll. You had a holster of highlighters in a million shades, and you’d use them to mark arrangements of blue spruce in a cartoonishly repeating landscape. Fossil teeth, or a dark motif not unlike the…
I might have guessed, running the streets that night, running each right down the middle, not meeting a car, rain soaking and so soft, my arms held out for the last corner to the house, that the dark figure on the porch swing would be my mother, the night and…
things might have been otherwise. Everyone remembers that time she walked in with flowers sewn onto the hem of her dress, charming to all but the flowers, and the fingers of outside light now lacking those flowers to act upon, and the passerby bee returning to find nothing there, and the drinking root done drinking….
You took my hand and took me to the train. The sky inhaled above us as we ran. The weather was suspended like a crane. The woman’s hand was taken by the man. The train was in suspension on its tracks. The woman took her ticket from her pocket. You left me at the train…
Our matriarch says we’re not a cemetery- visiting family, but she knows who is: the next of kin who sent the telephone fashioned entirely of flowers with the banner Jesus Called, Debbie Answered. Tonight, no wake, no funeral procession. Instead, we crack glow bracelets on the beach. Float seaweed bouquets knotted with washed-up bits…
In the garden, the cat barfed up two wings from some bird he couldn’t swallow. Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed. When you put it like that, it’s almost beautiful. Like, suddenly it all makes sense. Stickers on car windows keep reminding me that Idaho is shaped like a gun, just add a…
May you never bear fruit again. The disciples heard Him say it. I’ve been hungry too, told the car door to fuck off when I bumped my head. Kicked the dog, and shoved my son into his room. Woe unto. Poor tree. Whose fault, its fruit is born before its leaves. Then He overturned the…
By 1970, 33 states had banned shoe-store x-ray machines. Mr. Levitz sits on a stool measuring feet with a steel slide that feels cool when it nudges the tip of my toe. Future and past mean less than the ash on his cigarette, which will fall on the floor, because the plate in his…
In dreams, she sees her mother arrive in a land where the boreal canopy eclipses homeland. Her first memory of an elk in Jasper, Alberta: its legs seizing with strength, it gallops toward homeland. As she reads the Quran, she becomes a rose-ringed parakeet ascending over bismillah to find homeland. She is…
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