A punt, a water keg and some bottles washed up on the beach at Viareggio. Eight days passed before they found the body. The face and hands were fleshless, and everybody knows Keats’s poems were in his breast pocket, though what pierces me the most is how the book was doubled back as if the…
—Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society The man with the crooked dick strikes a match. The woman with one arm breaks into flame. The man finds a bird’s skull and wants to play catch. The woman hears the skull calling her name. He looks out the window. She looks in the door. He crushes…
On July 14, 1954, Frida Kahlo, who had swallowed the world whole, sat up in the crematorium cart and spit it out, her hair blazing like an aureole, her face smiling in the center of a sunflower before she disintegrated along with her seeds. The phenomenon of heat causing a body to rise has been…
Not far from San Diego steel ship containers packed with jeeps sit unopened and someone I know very well stands on the boulevard, surrounded by the pink and white stucco walls outside my window suspended in this moment between breathing out and breathing in the men and women at Camp Pendleton relax their arms…
Sometimes I wish that I was still out on the back porch, drinking jet fuel with the boys, getting louder and louder as the empty cans drop out of our paws like booster rockets falling back to earth and we soar up into the summer stars. Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead, bearing asteroids…
The June humid stars puff above the living giving our street the delicate shade of a sad mirror given to dark compulsion. How strange everything is when everything is so simple. The people of our street pace the spotlit sidewalks, they so not speak, they wait like patients wait for loved ones gone, gone. We…
Half of us were enrolled in the Army. Half of us were not. Half of us watched for thieves in the factories and were given no sleep. Half recited the day’s events into machines equipped with sensitive needles. Half never stopped training, and buried dried food at spots marked in red on maps. The songs…
That morning—a humid morning, early Spring, gray birds feeding on muddy lawns, the sound of a chain saw nearby, a red shirt tied to a battered tree, the empty smoke-streaked sky— That morning they held him in the green car and negotiated his punishment. They blindfolded him. His hand was held to something very hot…
You took the room in the attic. Watched television by yourself. I used to walk down the dim stairs to the basement to be with you at night, to listen to stories of plantations and dictatorships as you folded with precise care the underpants of my family. You who knew our human stains: faint arrowheads…
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