They seem disappointed in you, these faceless women, these shrinking enlargements standing around you, some turning away from the eye you can see through. You want to be open about all this, but what’s left of your mouth won’t say so, and what’s right can’t say anything good or bad. You wonder where you’ve been…
My mother, dead at my age, unclasps her beaded purse as if entering my house requires a ticket. For twenty-one years, she says, she’s carried the proper ID for pain, waiting to hand it over. She’s dreamed my body crippled in yesterday’s underwear, my breath caught in phlegm’s thick web. In a doubled brown paper…
How do you hold the dead when they’re hammered into a room so flat you can pick your teeth with one corner of the picture? When you were the one at that moment aiming the cheap camera at her wanting to fold her light into a square locket of time. You could see Noah’s Ark…
I’d like, about now, a little small talk, the grown-up kind between long agons some summer afternoon across a table, when what’s not said is not evasion but another language, every empty word and nodded half-sentence a hand laid on the arm. Such sweetness, all that time, you around me, like the rain in the…
I was looking at the Brian Bourke exhibition in the Fairgreen Gallery.? Outside, a man lay collapsed on the ground. It was freaking people out? they kept coming in telling the person? at the desk about the man on the ground. After a while the guards came, they were wearing blue gloves.? They knew the…
after A. D. Winans the java fires the lava flowing in my brain hot wet sex-rider screaming stains black cold heart bleeds lightning and rain as the dame in tight red takes the names of simpatico lames. bass notes cut rainbows thru me trues me like falling ten stories into love leaves me drunk and…
is guns given druthers of meaning or being. the old town look empty but for chattering lace blanching panes awaiting blood for eyes. saltpeter, all. even the buzzards dizzying down washpan dusks. buzzards: God’s hungry fingers. one gun chooses meaning—“this is for”—and sputters. this, for the gun that wins. the other? there’s God’s finger, carnal,…
A flock of pink flamingos moved in across the street, and set up plastic people on the lawn. They’ve faced them out this way, hands molded to their chins, looking more like us as night comes on. Downtown, the waitresses are starving in their aprons; the watchmen get fainter by the hour. It’s…
Altadena-summer mustard smog sun all yellow as I have become this year I fear I am fat and wear a t-shirt when swimming childish the T-shirt clinging to me through summer the gut of August summers before when I was born smack for air this year the smack of water as I…
Spring 2024 - Print