You are your father’s broad back re-writ in small script. Your feet, like his, grasp the soil, confident the planet will never spin too fast to throw you off. I never was so sure. I spent most of my childhood watching the clouds move while I stayed still. …
si vis pacem, para bellum— If you want peace, prepare for war. Today I slammed the door so hard the house fell behind me. If any ring remains, of rubble & consequence, my salt heart agape, an oh to construct the shape of the whole just before— This was my…
Before she died, my mother practiced turning herself into stone. Now she sits—a rock on my father’s grave, six feet above his reach. Each spring he punches a hole in his roof, sending up a riot of yellow flowers to tempt her into softening. The tendrils of his need claw the air, grope to touch…
I don’t wear long dresses because bad things always happen when I do. For Kai’s wedding, he hit his head skinny dipping afterwards on the cement by the pool, ended up in the ER while his bride slept, her father an inappropriate Gemini questioning me all night long, sober like the righteous lion. I wore…
Everything threatens— benches meant for children occupied by old men who clutter the playground and interrupt the slides where a schizophrenic takes interstellar dictation. I’m looking for a way out— not a way down and play the game of sidewalk juxtapositions: cons versus dot coms crazies versus kids in superhero shirts….
The boy won’t fall asleep without books, pictures before bed of polar bear who never leave a scent of blood against the ice, watered down tales of jolly rotten pirates setting sail. The cannons shoot coconuts. …
We have changed only in our teeth all of us look vaguely 19 but hard-lived for 19 I overheard it was a half-joke like your daughter she’s so easy to love to my father and we all laugh back home a hurricane is shaking the water and even here rain you look a little like a morgue cold skin and…
Plow your tweener backpack into your fellow sinner. I was fallen too. Sulk into your years and cropped organdy nails. Everybody’s watching. Your body’s burnt to ash, to the stranger’s thumbprint on your stubborn pimples. I see a younger you, a candle-smoke ghost hardening into form, fleshy knees and fists marbled at the altar rail. You’re still the baby who asked no deliverance. We’re not…
is about sorrow the same way the 56-ounce bag of red white and blue M&Ms is about sorrow. The former has a chorus in which Jurado croons is in your arms while the latter features text—resealable zipper!— at bag’s top because if you’ve got something too stupid to say aloud you should shout it. 71˚,…
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