The anniversary of some future sadness passes every day unnoticed. The calendars bear no trace of it; the candles stay in their box. In every house, there’s a dead mouse in the wall that the living mice build their nest beside. Meanwhile, it’s the usual programs aimed at the sagging couch.
The time will come—meanwhile you’ll add more ashes, that dirt in your hand. Goodbye, goodbye, you’ll learn to say it. What you want is dirt on the coffin, ashes in the grave. Not a glimpse, year after year, of someone on the street, turning a corner before I can see that red plaid shirt, torn…
Did I know him? Yes his speed (did I tell on him, turn him in?) fell out of his pocket climbing up my two-story steps—hmmm, what is this? crystal-like, kitcheny, condiment no wonder he talked so fast, eyes switching back & forth, if I sat at his feet with some slow narrative. He was a…
Could you love God in a world without death? Teacher asked. And we children shouted, a bristling forest of raised yearning arms. Yes! No! Depends! We didn’t know the answer, or even the question, just wanted to be admired for alacrity, vehemence prompted by authority. Some of us took the opportunity to punch our neighbors,…
There’s a radio station at the left end of the dial where you can listen to 24 hours of genocide and war crimes; how in the south the election was bought cheap by men in unmarked uniforms; how the contaminated medicine was shipped abroad until babies started being born with deformed spines. —And then the…
“There is a high risk of losses of lambs and sheep exposed to these conditions.” —Bureau of Meteorology, Western Australia “Cold pastoral!” —Keats I have done two drawings: one of sheep with lambs on a hillside near the old colonial mansion between here and town, and another of sheep dying with their dying lambs on…
Summer is entered through screen doors, and therefore seems unclear at first sight, when it is in fact a mesh of fine wires suspended panewise whose haze has confused the eyes… What if we never entered then— what if the days remained like this, a hesitation at the threshold of itself, expectant, tense, tensile as…
I was as true as the numbers it takes to make a fever, and even if July was a slow-burning ship, I could still find comfort in the scattered spectrum of wind chimes and sun catchers. But now the skyline lies in hangdog silence. Winter is a heavy opal clasped around my neck, and the…
Like a salty sailor, my son cusses his way out of bed and into the morning. Stubbed toe and no hot water, Mother Teresa. Burnt bagel, Mother Teresa. What a devious bride of Christ, orchestrating my son’s failures from the other side. She who blessed Calcutta lepers makes him run a stop sign bang in…
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