Poetry

The Accomplishment

I took a pin to my eyes and broke the surface tension and scooped out the machinery that so faithfully pictured what surrounds and refuses to wake us I sewed shut the lids singing I watched the sun rise with my brain and my skin and my useless pin and I fell from that terrible…

The Art Shows

Down among the art shows     they made some striking models, grotesqueries! It made us think     life wasn’t quite like that was! It certainly gave us pause.     It certainly gave us pause for thought. The room that had no windows     was interesting. The pictures where every face was always     the artist’s…

Conventional Semantics

The symposium entitled Why a Machine Can Write Better than You, and Does wasn’t nearly as popular as Flamethrowers: Is There One in Your Future?, and neither could hold a candle to Guppies in the Kitchen: A Normative Reading. The preponderance of jaded gardeners at Low-Maintenance Gravel: Future’s Flower was nearly equaled by the architects-on-the-lam…

Winter Apple

The last withered one held so long by such a weak tree. Who needed who? I’ll never know. It’s over. The apple just dropped to the snow crust. Things have changed. It’s the only color in the field. The one-eyed gray squirrel finds it by positioning his head to see the side blind to him….

January Weddings

On that January day of gales and sleety squalls the women were being married high on the hill above the city, in the chapel of the University and afterwards they stood in the cloisters shivering in their wedding gowns, being photographed, singly or with a kilted husband by their side the men taking quick drags…

The Days of Blue

Six days a week at 4:40 a.m. sharp, the town crew, two men named Harold in a green town truck, rumbled down the old sewer plant road as if there was a national emergency, crying out, “Code Big Blue, Code Big Blue,” trying to reach the sewer plant before the giant blue prophylactic surfaced and…

To Fly in Just Your Suit

Humans are flown, or fall; humans can’t fly. We’re down with the gravity-stemmers, rare, thick-boned, often basso. Most animals above the tides are airborne. Typically tuned keen, they throw the ground away with wire feet and swoop rings round it. Magpies, listening askance for their food in and under lawn, strut so hair-trigger they almost…