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…
The walls inside the city buildings curve, glass and plaster bending in thigh-shape, or breast-shape, a comfort to patients in RECEPTION, waiting to have their griefs or gallbladders removed, tumors and proud flesh pulled from the body, snipped off by the healer who has no sodden breast to offer in return, no nutriment, but only…
It’s just like the tongue, isn’t it, to fold you up into a tiny origami swan whose angled wings splay and whose jutted neck and beak point out over some expanse of water a tugboat hauling the mammoth frigate upstream the reckless kayaker tickling an eddy the currents changing temperature beneath your feet as you…
Sidewalk vendors look askance when I ask Am I headed East or West? I could tell them I navigate by the sky’s color but it wrong-foots me time and again. What sky? they say, looking up. The one that cracked wide one bright September, while we were looking away, the one that enchanted Portuguese cartographers,…
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