in memory of F.C. (1965–1991), who died of AIDS complications But there under the dark eaves of rain forest, we found Broughtonia, its crimson petals aflame, its yellow throat, veins hinting purple, rising to a sanguine corolla surrounded by sepals as crinkled as mourning crepe. We followed a path lengthened slash by slash, the islanders…
Because the world insists on still giving and giving at six, mastering addition seemed its natural complement, a kind of cataloguing the earth’s surplus. I loved the fat green pencil shedding graphite as I pressed rounded threes, looping eights into the speckled yellow newsprint. Loved, too, the sturdy, crossed bars of the plus sign, carrying…
after a painting by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Come with me, toward the leafless trees. See the way they lean, dazed with fog and grief as they seek out one another in the haze? Isn’t that how we are able to go on—by believing all that matters will one day be revealed? That is why…
It wasn’t exactly raining but a little wetness still dribbled down. I had been reading and sorrowing and set out with the dogs as an antidote. They went ahead snuffling in the leaf plaster. Despite the steady snick of my clippers boletus mushrooms kept popping soundlessly out of the ground. How else account for the…
The angle of the postman’s cap looked like he’d dressed himself in dark, the darkness, say, that’s lurching from his mouth, where teeth should be, a smile like charcoal, awkward on this full- grown man, but safer for his world where fuchsia picket fences float above a lumpy car that trails a cautious, chastened string…
The dogs have stopped barking. Even the grass has grown quieter, holding back from the wind. As you and I walk down the sidewalk, our voices are like a memory, whose deep purpose has gone inside, into the walls and floors and ceilings, where it no longer reaches the air but lies in wait for…
Wrung-out, aching, caked with a sweat he wouldn’t claim, living the wrong life, he shook the branch until the last apple fell, never glancing at the others, whose backs, as they gathered, were as arched and gravity-clutched as his, their gestures in the limbs as solemn, as exhausted of flight. Bees drifted where he labored:…
after Joao Cabral de Melo Neto To go to it often, to catch its level impersonal voice, says de Melo Neto in the graveyard’s moon-white orchards. To being hammered, the lesson in poetics, the speller of spells, he says. What did you learn standing with the east wind cutting over the fields of tilting stone,…
Because God wants us to have indefinite life, like Him, Richard Seed intends to electroshock an egg to implant his image and likeness into Gloria, his wife (to implant into Gloria, his menopausal wife, his shocked image and likeness) after inducing quiescence in its nucleus (moon-pause) so his DNA might nest there and…
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