When the pilot calls it rough air, I think of a cat’s tongue, as if the air itself were textured, as if we could feel its sandpaper licking our skin. I swallow my ears open, and the silence which is not silence at all fills them. In the absence of faith I resort to magical…
sometimes I’m issued a new head and the old one drops off and then I see the new one isn’t new it’s a used head, sometimes a bit moldy or flushed with rage, this head filled with notes on what is wrong with the world or carrying a list of expendables or groceries a head…
A tense obligato, the light comes up out of a shallow grave. It was only resting. Sulphur butterflies, taking a holiday in the garden, one in shades of yellow and orange, the other the same plus chestnut spots, drift above white-faced mallows, giving a sense of softness, richness to the situation, paralleling the stinks and…
a crisis averted in gulfport pops up again in forest hills or someone’s talking about a job bucking timber or after a cold lobster supper on the cape its fabricator forgets the singular phrase that explains everything and then you’re revoking yesterday’s permit or tailing a cheat across lower manhattan or you’ve just changed the…
I took absence down to the ocean and because it is blind, I told it about the waves. I held its warm hair. When it wept I placed my arms around the wind shape of a cliff and felt for edges. I walked beside absence in the streets at night and I let it tell…
Every drip startles me: rain falling off the edge of moon into the earth. Asleep next to a man who does not love me any more than he loves a river. I move to another room, closer to the rain without being touched. My brother sleeps (does he sleep?) in a rehab center in the…
“Fire at a Brooklyn Warehouse Puts Private Lives on Display,” (1 Feb 2015, The New York Times) No lives were lost. Nothing was gutted but the crumpling warehouse and its contents: medical forms, court transcripts, sonograms, bank checks. THEY’RE LIKE TREASURE MAPS, someone said of the half-charred scraps. But they weren’t. This was the opposite—…
It’s 11:02. I was supposed to take the kids outside at 10:13. My underwear is over my head. I’m trying to sniff out the boy I once was, my private parts tiny and nutmeg. I didn’t give a shit about Superman. I was in love with Watergate. Watergate was my super hero. All that corruption….
In this new country of ours we will, let’s face it, be endlessly debating, endlessly refining, so much talking!—at least in the beginning, when we’ve just arrived. And probably later as well, always arriving as we are in this mortality, with so much to say and so little mind-reading. We will continue to use words…
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