A homeless woman at the reference desk asked, “Am I an angel, or merely a supernatural creature?” She was agitated, all the muscles of her narrow face in nervous motion, and I was too startled to answer. A man I worked with, who often ignored patrons for his own reading, rose and stepped forward to stand…
The dogs in the neighborhood are barking.At the end of his lead our young dogstalls in darkness between yards and digs inhis two-year weight. He has a scent—God is in the garden.I crouch and point my light. Characters run across yards with pumpkin bucketsand faces in masks or marked with paint.This is what trembling feels…
which is a biographical fact only ever statedwhen discussing a man of either unrivaledrighteousness or extreme wickedness. Imagine this: He never once used a bellin his saliva experiments, unless you countthe plink of kibble falling from his dogs’ surgically opened throats, and why wouldyou want to count that? I admit I often tellyou about the…
A term given to us by Franz Gall, fatherof phrenology, the lost art of God’s failure to erase each ridge and bump from your skull.For which Gall invented his method to codify God’s errors: a bumpfor adventurers and a bump for homebodies. A bump for the vicious and a bumpfor the kind. Before you were…
Lugging a corpse with you everywhere you went.Strapped to your back.Slumped in a wheelchair.Dragged on a sled or pulled in a red wagon.The corpse keeping you focused on your mortality.Reminding you that ultimately you’re just a corpse. At first it was a fringe thing.Hipsters only.Then celebrities got involved.Hauling their corpses to the Oscars and whatnot.Corpses…
for C.P. What to do with all this flame but douse itwith paper cupfuls of red and yellow pills.What to do with the sun that licks its rose blazein the tiled corners of this ward, with the hours,with the burden of relief we’re allowed to feel.We still breathe. We still walk the hallsin our spoiled…
He said he would hang himselfso as not to make a mess. But he was still there the next day.And the next. And the next. He wrote the note for the copson a page he tore from my favorite book of poems. That’s all I saw of it—in absence—the ripped-out page like a jagged fin…
I don’t remember wearing itto school or after dark to the Halloween partywhere apples for bobbing floated in tubs.I don’t remember staring in the mirror to admiremyself in the half- mask, white blouse and blackskirt, the fabled red hood gaudy with sequins.My father paid for my first store-bought costume. Whochose? Why her? There are no…
Three days after my chemo infusion,the hospital Chapel’s framed inspirational wordswishing us well in moving forward,I send myself flying with frozen lips and bad ski equipment,arms and legs draggingagainst the winter’s cold molecules—no longer regretting the frilly white gift saved from the affair in Vaduzthat I wore during confessionunder my street-length blackskirt, feeling its lusty…
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