When the home-aid nurse comesto check on my mother’s drainage tubeI am sharpening my kniveswith my new Bavarian edge. When I hear the nurse say proximityto the toxin, I entertain the thoughtthat disease might be seenas a measure of intimacy. A knife is my favorite kitchen helper.Come a little closer.Look here at what iswanting near….
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 free from the bone. You want my voice echoing into…
The old city rushes into me as soon as the planedescends, and my drunk bravado shudders.I swear to myself that I will not confrontmy family with my suffering this time around.I’ll be a civilized person instead and keeplongstanding resentment to myself. Even the partof me that is gristle and nerve is strangelyquiet. The dot dot…
O cotton-headed kissful. Tender likingof my broken skin. Fierce betrayal of instinctwrapped in embers and undiagnoses. I have missed you.I think you might have been just the firstof my forbidden desires, artifact of my deep impulseto transition a thing to another thing.Take medicine and turn it into a weapon.We knew each other over Wednesday night…
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 serfsin 19th century Russia in all those booksyou saved but that in the end couldn’t save you back.I would have thought a better turnout,more like the Second Comingbut without the judgement, just the music:“the wind that sweeps the streets of heaven.”Among believers, and I’m not one,there’s disagreement…
You will never finish your lifethe way you intended.The bed you will never get up fromis not the one you wanted,by a lake or river’s edgewhere the light toucheseach bird awakeexcept the onethat kept watch all night.
It is like a long tunnel, the strange, shallow light of the hospital hallwayshining against all the stainless steel they always put around those kindsof places. The steel shines a dark, tunnelish light. A feeling of objectivitythey want to impart to you. Like, your baby has died. Objectively. I readonce that they change a person…
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