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…
I am sitting next to you & you are not there, you’re a frameless heat, mass of ruptured air. to be clear, you are the spit & liver it takes to be human & I want it & I think you want me to have it all, but I know what it’s like to be…
In the country of urgency, there is a language. —Grace Schulman I must have said something to the man in my confusion when I put my hand on his shoulder long enough for a cement truck to breeze by —it would have killed him— instantly, I think, when the light changes and its change falls…
The last tug at the sleeve lets her blouse fall off shoulders to breasts that have never seen a lover, she shudders, shakes so hard I touch the bones inside the song of this afternoon to stop the loud way our fear of us rattles her in the flutter of bugs so fragile they can…
Desire for the good deal, the hot need to look slick, wordless advertisement for the invisible product, I release you like the dumpster behind the cafeteria releases these long, festering rivers of milk. Fear of death, fear of narrow spaces, love of the wine-red mole that punctuates the transaction-inspiring cleavage of Jill, my credit union…
The cookies his neighbors brought by didn’t taste like pity— at my father’s house for the first time, after, the locks broken into, now new, when cross the street comes a neighbor, cookies shrouded in tinfoil, a plate I need not return. How long had the pair kept vigil out the window for someone to…
Because there’s no end to cruelty, Lyle ties half a brick to a hen’s foot, climbs the ladder up the water tower where waits Tony—together, they toss their weighted hens into space: the flung chicken that charts its course across clear air, fans its…
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