Through the soft pulp of farmed pine, the saw moves with the incessant logic of progress. Why stand up when you can fall down? Why be a tree when you can be a house? Here there is nothing to hope for but branches. As the saw works, it whispers of soft flanks weathering in lumberyards….
I would like to take it all back, this suit doesn’t belong to me. I’m the undercover man, an agent transferred to a far district. What I fear is a murmur from across the fields, the giant leech that just slid over the porch railing. If I listen to the singer — it’s a state…
This one does its work by returning over and over to the place where it began until even memory bears no splinters. Flatness, flatness, the plane dreams as it sweeps down every plank envisioning unsown fields, boxcars, Unitarian churches. “Lie down,” sings the plane. “Lie down and be the same as all the rest.”
for my aunt The water is dark and cold and I can hold it. I drink from my hands. You are out of my reach, your eyes closed holding only a thin blue light. Moss darkens my window, covering the sky like hair. Here, we can’t see the moon. It views you from the head…
At the table she used to sew at, he uses his brass desk scissors to cut up his shirt. Not that the shirt was that far gone: one ragged cuff, one elbow through; but here he is, cutting away the collar she long since turned. What gets to him finally, using his…
At the confluence of the Red River and the Assiniboine, exactly two hundred miles and fifty northwards from Fargo, North Dakota, the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba; from the Cree word win-nipiy meaning `murky water’, not, as I had thought, from a peg, or some other such, which had once belonged to Winnie. And the cold…
Doniphan Louthan, 1920-1952 I do not remember the day you disappeared. I was too young to understand, still small enough to curl up in your hat. When I questioned mother years later, she told me you had gone to heaven, but I knew better. You were in her heart, and kept it beating by pacing…
It was just after the flood— days, or at most a week. The caretaker’s hut was locked, the windows meshed with wire to keep people, not mosquitoes, out. Poachers’ tracks—the diamondback imprint of tires in mud— stretched under the REFUGE sign to a wooden bridge, splintered by somebody’s pickup or backhoe last March. The bridge…
In mirrors all I see Is my own reflection My table is not a horse Onions are something I eat There is no forest In my cupped palm The sun does not set Past the ridge of my fingers Doors only lead me into The next room When I shut my eyes Blackness surrounds me…
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