Not the ratcheting crescendo of Ravel’s bright winds but an older, crueler passion: a woman with hips who knows when to move them, who holds nothing back but the hurt she takes with her as she dips, grinds, then rises sweetly into his arms again. Not delicate. Not tame. Bessie Smith in a dream of…
In spite of what we know about the millionth chance, whose lessons on statistics prove our lives will glint unchanged from month to month, we scrape gold tinfoil off the quick picks, shove half-dollars in the one-armed bandits, move to cities where new money rings a bell. Our self-renewing visions of a trove though toxic…
The uppercase motions sustained their forms of cruelty. I tried to delineate fictions, But the math of things was small. It did not give me room to take my cup. It did not give me room to speak an answer. In the diluted sunlight, a world rolled off. I barely recognized the sinking myth. It…
In the middle of the hunt, I must excuse myself, and all through silent polished halls feel the dog-breath on my sling-back heels. Being flesh, being always hungry, I mostly swallow what is thrown. But am not glutton, but furnace burning punishments. And know the protocol for butchery, but cannot call it to my mind….
loquitur: Anton Raphael Mengs Court-Painter elect to Charles III of Spain Signori, you have my gratitude for the signal honor of this banquet, the learned discourses, as well as, of course, the great distinction of your company. “Old Mengs,” you call me among yourselves, and it is true: I am …
Not wilderness exactly open country a wooded valley and the river in it waterfall and towpath footbridge lockhouse a canal that runs to Cumberland beside the Potomac not wilderness you know that bounded parkland with your neighborhood above it stage set by some Luminist where you describe the hour convinced no calendar can register a…
Arias, not only of voice, but as when tan grasses blow and bend yellow and pink then darken then yellow, or someone’s betrayal fills another with darkness—so I have felt my fill. At the opera this week Pagliacci— heartbreaking, sexy—lover, husband, wife, another lover scorned. The week before the town gossip: a friend having left…
lynch not as in pin, the kind that keeps the wheels turning, and not the strip of land that marks the border between two fields. unrelated to link, as in chain, or by extension whatever connects one part to another, and therefore not a measure of chain, which in any case is…
You showed up late and angry. You shat upon the floor. With that, how could we fail to recognize you? Your father, grief’s tent show wizard, the long connected silks pouring from his sleeve. And your mother? Haven’t you known me wholly as the spider knows each tilting and imperfect room she sews to be…
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