—for Richard McCann At first it was unacceptable— strangers dressed in black, walking away or toward a hole in the ground, each a version of you. Seven hundred reasons to dig holes in the earth—some look for water, some need a fence. Some for this seed, some for that body. my God, your body. When…
When the home-aid nurse comes to check on my mother’s drainage tube I am sharpening my knives with my new Bavarian edge. When I hear the nurse say proximity to the toxin, I entertain the thought that disease might be seen as a measure of intimacy. A knife is my favorite kitchen helper. Come a…
What you snuck past: a vast copper body, two plastic hands all the better to twist you from this empty palace. You are not yet who you will be, little sac of yolk, blood clot drifting through. What should we do with you who bedded down in a field of red clover? You want a piece of cake, meat silky and tender, slipping…
The old city rushes into me as soon as the plane descends, and my drunk bravado shudders. I swear to myself that I will not confront my family with my suffering this time around. I’ll be a civilized person instead and keep longstanding resentment to myself. Even the part of me that is gristle and…
O cotton-headed kissful. Tender liking of my broken skin. Fierce betrayal of instinct wrapped in embers and undiagnoses. I have missed you. I think you might have been just the first of my forbidden desires, artifact of my deep impulse to transition a thing to another thing. Take medicine and turn it into a weapon….
I don’t know what death is either, I think, unplugging the earbuds and ordering a decaf latte, iced. I don’t know where my father is, or mother, or where to tell my daughter she can find me. I watch the barista make the espresso shots—her down-to-there, sapling arms, the left one hanging lifeless while the…
When I needed a Barden bumper for my bumper-less truck, I walked through a junkyard: bolts & gauges on the ground, wheels rolling nowhere or steering nothing, dead headlights illuminated by sunbeams. A bird alit on chrome. I shivered at the delicacy of what I could not see: a laugh & This is my favorite…
So few souls … that’s what they called the serfs in 19th century Russia in all those books you saved but that in the end couldn’t save you back. I would have thought a better turnout, more like the Second Coming but without the judgement, just the music: “the wind that sweeps the streets of…
You will never finish your life the way you intended. The bed you will never get up from is not the one you wanted, by a lake or river’s edge where the light touches each bird awake except the one that kept watch all night.
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