since I couldn’t say tomorrow I said Wednesday since I couldn’t say Cleveland I said Ohio since I couldn’t say hello I hung up since I couldn’t say burger a waitress finished my sentence a green-striped mint dissolved on my tongue from peacock to dove since I couldn’t say my name I opened as if…
Someone else died again, and when I heard, I felt the green ocean like a suffocating quilt pulled over me. I had a father once with a heroin needle in his arm. So what am I capable of? I’d rather flip a book open than attend a party, feel my numbed fingertips in the cold…
“Nature’s Grand Hotel has its Season, like the others. As the guests one by one pack, pay, and depart, and the seats at the table-d’hote shrink pitifully at each succeeding meal…Why not stay on quietly here, like us, and be jolly?” —Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows Don’t sit too close, the smell of…
A brick warehouse, a cold morning, and Newark in the distance. Bleak is how I take my coffee, inside a shipping container while a plane cranks by. Thinking something about “the bloom of youth” something I’ve lost something a man would feel right saying but which sits under my tongue, unwanted pill. I do take…
Remember the night it snowed in a place we were told would never snow and like two shadows cast by a lamp standing in the presence of a Greater we walked the beach the sand’s grit limpid the expanse of what I didn’t know endlessly swallowing the floes the ocean has always been immutable and…
Laughing at the thought of lack of pleasure as a pleasure— monuments not yet objects, a waltz not for dancing but for labor— and having slogged through pollen, considerable weeds and fallen power lines to be here, I have more to say about this day than of the year. Blasphemy’s part of the Logos too,…
In the beginning, there was the lattice work of the body. You climbed me the way a cat… [wait, let me start over] In the lattice work of the body, we began. You climbed inside me. Fixed there like an eye in a socket. You…
The Forever Rachel chiseled into a tree and many years later written in the water of a pond. Forever Rachel in her mesh hikers, stepping over a sleeping policeman. Hair under her arms. Hair on her legs. Wielding a picket sign every other day. She made her prom dress out of old newspapers and during…
Translated by Andrew Wachtel I walked ahead, there was no other path. Doors cut us off from the past: mama was aging, the tree burned up, and something was wrong with the sick man’s chest. Everywhere I went a beggar woman followed, with a belly bloated like a globe, but she didn’t ask for cash…
Winter 2008-09 - Digital