I’m driving through your neighborhood. It’s quiet and lonely, like a summer lake without a boat. In the air, white silk light, slow as milk. I can see through the houses. They’re more than themselves, like a minuend before the subtraction of the subtrahend. My thought music points me north. I’ve forgotten one of my […]
The naked woman in the video I study—double mastectomy—tosses me into possibility, presses the soft muscle of what remains of self against self, sternum and rib shucked clean by surgical steel. She stands sculpted, a torso hewn to scarred catastrophe— emptied parentheses. The Mayans called it zero, this mussel shell emptied of its muscle set […]
I say poem, the phone hears problem. Maze, no escape. Driving with my mother in a manic state. The sharpness of her no. Telling it like it is. She says “Crazy!” trying to explain. Unanswerable strangeness of the human brain. Equations, undoable. How to keep sane the status she wants to return to. I say […]
We squat unbroken, faces toward the earth, feet on the shoulders of the one below us, fingers covering their eyes as we cup their heads between our palms, as if reading their minds, feeling the weight of others on our backs, their warm hands blocking our sight, generations of shiny bodies stacked like vertebrae pierce […]
I could play the guitar just barely and I would try when we’d arrive home all liquor dilated, hearts more capable of loving. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing that lights me up like this once did. The magic in my life is quieter now, but grace, once parsimonious, now crackles through my […]
I He cared for her whimsy and for the way her shyness played out. At some gotcha point, in the negative spaces of photos spotted at some exhibition downtown, he started to imagine her silhouette, her T-shirt a burst of yellow competing with Cape Cod pelicans and stealthily-erected Jotunheimen high-rises. She confided in him like […]
the way doubt sits in your eyes like a flat left front tire waiting for me to rummage around in the trunk for a spare whisper of encouragement a tire iron of hope Karen Vande Bossche is a Bellingham, Washington poet and short story writer who teaches middle school students who ask questions such as […]
On birch bark, with chicken bone shards dipped in a pot of moth wing dust: an ink only visible near bioluminescent seaweed. I’ll roll and slip them into glass capsules and load these onto hummingbirds’ backs. You’ll know my words have reached you when the wingbeats fill your ears, and you’ll learn that love sounds […]
ocean ellipsis mouth we catch ourselves a grumble in the time gap maw’s energetic swallow her beast, her quickening where were all the murderous bowlegged dangers i avoided rollerskating down Mermaid Avenue back when tides washed the back legs of youth’s agency there in the subatomic catacomb an organism of prisms sold in the back […]
The words return, fold over and begin anew, a shrouded spring enveloping mockingbirds in shaded trees who curse their surroundings in alternate rounds, as if fighting with the dawn. Their tune’s timbre recasts yesterday and all tomorrows as a graveyard of upended trees. Soon, all creatures bent on survival will throb with the song suspended […]
Wagner Castings Co., 1994 It was all golden air and sepia pavement, gray smoke blooming from industrial stems. Fly ash flecked parking lot air, drifting black snow. Smell of melting rubber and brushfires. I thought the world would always be that way: low rumbling machinery, conveyer belts spun thin, cracks spreading like thickening veins, distant […]
See this Lithuanian woman. She has been feeding my father dinners of mashed turkey and broccoli, potato pancakes, washing his clothes, bathing him, offering him the choice between Wolf Blitzer and Vanna White for years. Observe her hands as they gently push his body to the side of the hospital bed. They are covered with […]
after Night of the Rats by Mark Andres [one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]my sleep—[/one_sixth][one_sixth]it makes me[/one_sixth]fall down. [one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]my jazz[/one_sixth][one_sixth]how it [/one_sixth]croons & whistles. [one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]my lover’s [/one_sixth][one_sixth]spirit[/one_sixth]boogie. [one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]buildings[/one_sixth][one_sixth]in me[/one_sixth]crumble. [one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]music stand;[/one_sixth][one_sixth]holy[/one_sixth]talent-hands. [one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]marquis,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]scarlet[/one_sixth]velvet. [one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]humble[/one_sixth][one_sixth]ladder[/one_sixth]chair. [one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]moon who’s[/one_sixth][one_sixth]breathing[/one_sixth]fire. [one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]aspect:[/one_sixth][one_sixth]slow burn[/one_sixth]in glass. [one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]you who[/one_sixth][one_sixth]leave me[/one_sixth]undisturbed. [one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]perturbs me[/one_sixth][one_sixth]with lights[/one_sixth]and brushes. [one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]neighbor’s[/one_sixth][one_sixth]voice[/one_sixth]aflame. [one_sixth]Sacred[/one_sixth][one_sixth]ivy[/one_sixth][one_sixth]razes[/one_sixth]my house. [one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]the rivulets;[/one_sixth][one_sixth]sacred[/one_sixth]the leaves. [one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth][one_sixth]portal[/one_sixth][one_sixth]like[/one_sixth]half-lidded eye. [one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth]the dust motes. [one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth]the grace notes. [one_sixth]Sacred,[/one_sixth]the […]
1. You get in the car and I know you have something to tell me, not because I see the unspoken pooling in the curve of your eye, but because I feel you not speaking. 2. Afterwards we lie in bed, your head cradled beneath my clavicle; you say, What did you just think about? […]
The dog sniffs a fire hydrant. The son shoots baskets until dark. The grass is sharply edged along the sidewalk. It takes only a moment for the man to forget he is father, husband, for his wife to become stone. He clenches his fist, brings back his arm, as though winding up for a pitch. […]
With a red pen, the disease draws inside my abdomen a chain of volcanoes erupting on cue and rivers of lava sliding across organs, then hardening into rock, traces on my ovaries silhouettes of faces that will never be, scrawls on my uterus infinity symbols. The disease takes years to gestate. The disease claims dominion […]
two months at best the doc said, and we went home… —in drowning rain —in pregnant silence —in circular, useless thought * houseplants * * houseplants * * houseplants * (need watering) and we’re still out of milk… ‘better remember to— oh! a new lymphatic system! you need a new lymphatic system, too… ‘missing red […]
The air is thick with ambivalence. The residue of those both forgotten and pushed away. A watchtower too certain of its own authority. The slow grating of a mechanical door granting one passage in and out of the yard. The dull gray of clothing rendering life invisible against a backdrop of concrete walls. Barbed wire […]
In the middling Alabama unpopular girls grow tall and firm given the cover of hundred-foot magnolia tree towers. Given limbs too thick to rustle, betray, or give a girl away. Make it so you can never look up and say it wasn’t me. Never say you are not the girl who wobbled into magnolia arms […]
If monuments
are all that survive us,
if Palmyra,
dead for centuries,
is all that stands for beauty,
if, blind
(1) When sleep comes the cortège stops by cairns, tugs the silver cord, nearly always with ravens. Only here, snapped back to white chairs, dew, do I recover details—umbrella faces, black suits, cousins, hatchbacks, clunk shut. A day off school, same uniform, blazer apt. Puce curtains close. Organ music. Brother’s hand round my elbow. His […]
Behind the wired window drinking grape juice women swoon to the gospel oxidized like corked wine On D-Block we write letters Dear bud of forsythia Dear love Dear fetus Salutations pour from us like wine We watch each other cradle our cloth and clothespin dolls […]
The cardinals built their nest in the cow’s skull tucked into brain cavity today is the day of fledglings testing pinion strength of warmth creeping through roots steam whisping above not-so-gold-carp pond ++++++++++++++++++++babies venture out through eye sockets arboreal dreams ++++++inherited desire gives them lift but maybe they have no thought to question from where? […]
Drink this tea, he said, and you will fly naked into starlight. I drank, felt tired, and sat on the couch and ate potato chips. Drink this tea and you will not know yourself. We drove along the freeway by your old school, without direction or speed as light raptured down through barred clouds scudding […]
All night the wind strummed the shingles, while I slept with my jaw like a fist. She wanted sex first thing in the morning to the rhythm of the percolator’s clicks. Her aunt had a real Chagall hanging over the piano. She stocked the freezer with Grey Goose, then traveled for months. We claimed the […]
What can I tell you? I confess from you I learned sweat is poison as well as nectar, & there is no good word for how I linger as you exhale. I confess I am a cracked mirror, & you are a stone, a bird, starlight tickling the fractures. From you I learned jilting doesn’t require […]
A small town. A back door. A young woman at her work chopping, searing, holding. A flash, not so much of light, as the chorus of sight that light trails as it passes by. A strange word, an aspiration, a slight bow of the head, a warm wrapping of wings. There will be lions, later. […]
Days were short and buckled, the dinner to prepare, our table to set, cream and tan plumage to fan in a gold-rimmed goblet, hint of flight. Together we hunted wild turkey feathers, tracked hay fields where flocks lumbered in summer, walked a trail over to the next road, followed it past the last house as […]
(after Clementine von Radics) I open my mouth & nothing comes out—I think, chest caving in, robber of breath, thunderbolted knees hitting the bathroom floor but it felt more like tumbling down a staircase into the basement of a heart that no longer relays rhythm, my shoveled out stomach— a hearse, a grave, a place […]
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