When the infant head bursts out, the fire begins to die, shoulders, like displaced rocks, find a place to rest until they are pulled, twisted out into the air to steam, then cool. Everything hisses and smokes as when lava finds ocean. Now there is an After. After it is done. After her first minute….
The mask tires of itself. The beautiful dream blown again. The world won’t shake its own hand. Air fills with bone- powder, hair-lint, blood-flecks or the body’s demolished light, shattered mid-thought, mid-stance, mid- breath, mid-word, mid-kiss. Can thinking wend a way back to where the body feels? To where it quivers, retracts, roots? Mind discontinues…
The boys’ stories of the tobacco— splotched and yellow “toad” squirting blood from eyes and licking red ants don’t prepare you for a patch of the field rising and rushing blurry, then stopping, fitting earth tightly, the last puzzle piece. Nor do you know how you’re guided to it, and though they’ve told you…
my little bird don’t worry bout money she don’t worry little bird for worry don’t add up but a bunch of empty seeds no your single moment is now You long lovely thing your every moment is long and today and also yesterday when meek and lowly the whole world belonged to you You longing…
Where will you go? Will there be a nail brush, face cream, a cotton-pressed comb? Will there be toothpicks? Dove soap? A small towel? Will there be a shoe horn? Will you sleep? Will there be others? Will there be a quiet room, a firm bed? Will you lie prone with your hands on…
Only symmetry harbors loss. —Lorna Dee Cervantes Throatlatch. Crupper. Martingale. Terret. My breath tightens around him, like a harness. Once a year he eats a spoonful of dirt from his father’s grave. In his sleep he mutters lines from his favorite flick, Capulina …
Walk with me on the carriage path where we have walked through the park to the cliff where the hawks drift in spiral streams, in clear currents. Sit with me. Read to me. Start at the beginning. Read steadily, we can finish the book, the chapter, the page, the paragraph. I have no choice,…
If I bisect my head what grasslands might I find, what flecks of plaster what walls. What genuflects cracks to these streets, vacant lots. There was a sandal, a child standing in it, & dust. Each sequence a leather strap creasing. Each crossroads with arrowsigns, distances, placenames crossed out. There was a tollbooth…
Not really knowing the difference between herons and cranes, that summer we named the two birds that came to Boehmke’s Cove (which were almost surely not cranes but herons because of the way they flew with their heads drawn in close to their bodies, and for their topknot crests of feathers) “Stephen Crane” and “Hart…
No products in the cart.