If you sneeze into a towel you can thank the fluffed cotton for not being steel you can thank the cotton boll for not thinking how to grow but growing anyhow through hard flatpacked deep south dirt in one slow-motion explosion from seed not out but up up in a stiff upward thrust you can…
September 1846 1 We find scraps of paper with bits of handwriting scattered on the ground at the foot of a post. Perhaps it is a message for us. Spread on my lap where I have gathered blossoms, held my babies, I hold this future: random shreds of paper have a scheme the…
Sacrificing to the four quarters I find the winds responsive. The rains come and I wish them here. I walk without shoes in the rain. Once from a bush a voice spoke to me— from the old brown skull of a murdered man: he told me his life story. Hearing, I knew it once more….
Dear Tarzan: I have often wondered how you like being Tarzan instead of the regular Joe. Do you really enjoy swinging on vines and all that? It must be great to be a hero and have fans all over the world, and kids imitating the way you talk, and of course you have a…
For years there was a struggle to recover the famous recipes, but now the one essential herb will flower only after a special chant, and we’ve forgotten it. True, there is a substitute but taken internally it makes us irritable and proud. I’ve tried to be pure; I even hammered my wrath into a crude…
I Five miles up, winds unravel to their different colors. The pilot gazes at the lost land. Velvet cows plod between seams of a checkerboard, green and yellow squares. The land reduces to a puzzle of primary colors. If anyone looked up they would see his plane disappear, just as he watches them melt like…
for my friend Sweeney Post, American Legion Hall, was cold with dead spots in the boards. We practiced with herniated basketballs and rural cheerleaders. In Brooklyn, you finally screwed your Jewish Princess, mourning for her father. We lost an infant. A big Irish nurse ate her one morning in the sunroom before the ward grew…
Anxiety a low-grade nausea associated with the idea that there is no position left for you to fill often experienced when engaging on any new activity in which case it may feel like euphoria When she finally paused, she had trouble breathing, the air was so thin the altitude so high. Choice the self-making of…
Don’t turn around. It is the expected behind us, we have only to move forward along the stalk of surprise as it grows and branches. It is winter. The trees march away from the window like the ghostly skeletons of fish. They take me from this place, stalks that lead to the next season, landmarks…
Winter 2010-11 - Digital