They are big fans of horror film. In the fading light of a November afternoon, The gray surface of a pond Looks like a movie screen to them. The moving branches reflected in it Are like the fingers of the blind Groping to touch the face of someone Who’s been calling out to them In…
There are feelings I would rather not have, so I avoid certain types of texts and images— particularly pornography. Sometimes I think this makes me a better person, but, in actuality, it also makes me a coward. Am I so afraid I’ll enjoy some ridiculously sexist fantasy? I’m not sure what I’d do with the…
The graveside prayers and eulogies over, A stray dog came to bark at us among the headstones As we trooped back over a hill watching The wind lift the widow’s skirt higher and higher, While the undertaker ran after us, Waving an umbrella someone had left behind. We couldn’t help but think of our friend…
Out in the open, there is a cowshed. There are the expected gaps and hornets. Here lives our story, where we used to meet— You smelled like hay, were always listening to some other sound, the buzzing of your own ideas chasing us down. You began building a staircase out of thorny branches, then a…
Growing up, there were always two laws. My mother, the greater, the greatest Who made enemies if necessary out Of the trashman or the paperboy. Queen without her court and details, Commands so precise, you could not Follow if you were not one of her students; If you did not know her nobility you might…
When the sun broke up the thunderheads, and dissonance was consigned to its proper place, the world was at once foreign and known to me, that was shame leaving the body. I had lived my life from small relief to small relief, like a boy pulling a thorn from his foot. Wet and glistening, twisting…
In the church, midweek at noon, there is a middle distance between the piercing blue window of pure belief and the bone vault housing my heart’s disbelief, a dim yielding distance related to my prayer: another day’s delay before you are nowhere— for death fixes all distances like a new nail.
Thirty-six years till my mother is born The perfumes she wore when she was young whatever happened The bottom of her jewelry drawer calls and calls as I run her through her first school play She doesn’t understand Stroke my stomach mother till I understand Why is the movie too advanced? Why do we have…
Sometimes at dusk when the earth gives its sweet breath to the trees, I think how I have taken a stranger’s life and whispered not so much as his name to the asphalt sky. How each year, on my mother’s birthday, I hear the warbled rasp of his breathing and it pushes and draws me…
Winter 2018-19 - Print