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I knew better than to light light after light. I knew—I can’t recall to see candles out and could put the house down in burning—. What if someone asked me, then, do you want to receive its ashes? I’d say yes, that’s the right thing…(but deep down I’d say no, no ashes.). To imagine the…
I. at thirteen for a whole dark season I was lethal with my pellet gun murdering small things that wandered into yard stalking the thin woods between our house & the highway— I picked off any bird squirrel rabbit snake I could track if I had two surprised seconds to explain the meaning of my…
Yesterday, jackrabbit belly was not a color. Today I hold a paint strip to the wall, and it’s true: this is the exact shade of a rabbit’s soft fur, of the sepia robe of St. Francis, whose followers swirled like birds, or were birds, St. Francis being one willing to trade like for like. An…
Two women are walking on the ocean floor I’m the one in front, holding an oxygen mask then passing it back to my mother We take turns She breathes I breathe She breathes I breathe We can’t talk we just keep walking and breathing and sometime towards morning I notice she’s gone A bit of…
Throw scissors at it. Fill it with straw and set it on fire, or set it off for the colonies with only some books and dinner- plates and a stuffed bear named Friend Bear for me to lose in New Jersey. Did I say me? Things have been getting less and less hypothetical since I…
every day someone finds what they need in someone else you tear into a body and come out with a fistful of the exact feathers you were looking for wondering why anyone would want to swallow so many perfect feathers everyone looks uglier naked or at least I do my pillar of fuzz my damp…
Sun Ra claimed to hail from Saturn, but he and his Intergalactic Arkestra still had to suffer the trials of earthly travel. When his agent phoned us to say they’d be driving up early, a day before their hotel was expecting them, we had to scramble to find beds. Adam, our piano player, lived in…
By the window in the fancy hotel— looking out, looking out with them. A little coffee. A little cake. These things have come for me. And not a secret, but apparent from which I come out of how I could stand back, and let happen the birds, and the sea, and the sky. I woke…
Houston, 1953 Masses of one un-housed household added to another, all abandoned and made to abandon their names. A non-colonnade of gray clods. A un-quadrangle of neo-rational obliteration. An arcade of ashes. Ditch-buried hordes of kin left akimbo, an imprisoned necropolis on the verge of the vast acres of the settled precincts of our planet—or…
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