after Joy Harjo The verb has a long history of violence: to take is to grab, seize or capture, esp. by force; note its hard k set against the long vowel, a sign of intent, this cave of sound. He took her by the throat and shook her is one in a proliferation of…
Oak branches shuffling slow amends in the sorry wind, as if trying to push A large gift into your arms. Step back into your dusty boots, love, left & Right then, creased like fruits gone to rot. Filling up an outline of myself, Is all. You’re the reason here they call a mouth a trap….
it starts in rage not anger or rancor or a bitch cornered whose fear-fuelled snarl turns fit nor the politesse of some pale Ramon screaming no more of a jonesing more veins stretched as pig gut over sphincter mince more a thumbnail that breaks the skin to pull a strip or length of rind to…
when the sun un-sets, and vanilla wakefulness is still somewhat subservient to sleep’s dirty kingdom? Well there I was, inside some sixteenth-century Padua and I watched agog as pretty maids in period underclothes scampered laughing down a palace’s back stairs; and on those stairs, wedged pressed against a wall between the ceiling and the floor,…
that once cool and heavy egg that would one day have hatched a clever goose of gold. I cooked it in a pan until it smelted from a hard into a runny yolk, and then I promptly drank the molten yellow, gulped it down and felt it start to burn away my tongue and gums…
The deer has the eyes of a deer in headlights. I must have them too, sitting in the car, driving. The deer came out of nowhere. It is magic. It’s the kind of magic you wish wouldn’t happen. The deer must be thinking the same about me. The road came out of nowhere, this man…
as though the ocean swept it away like a sand dune. If I pretend there was no restaurant then I never saw your glossy eyes, where the old man who’d sit at the counter each day said I can tell he’s a pervert. Just look at his eyes. But if there was no restaurant then…
It was as if I were trying to climb into its eyes or mouth, the animal that inhabited me, as if I could take myself by surprise and thereby rid myself of the thing that bothered me. My zoo was open. It was supplied with creatures that might be exhibited without an entrance fee or…
I don’t know what to do with beauty, with the curled lip, with the delicate bones and the cocked wrist, with that sudden sense of being hurled into a place I have no right to be, as if to exist on such ground might be forbidden, allowed only a glimpse, then what to do with…
No products in the cart.