Then in the motel room they rented by the month—with the kitchenette & the microwave & the mini-refrigerator & cable tv When he sat upright & peered at the ceiling each lung an ocean eyes wide & hands tight on the arms of the recliner My father swears he saw the host of heaven call […]
My mother fashioned my hair +++++iinto rows of wheat. ++++++++++++++++iI am in a plaid button down ++++++++++++++++++++++iand cow girl boots– ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++this is the year +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++iiI will declare my All-American heritage: +++++ino more cornrow pleats ++++++++++++++++ior Southern meals. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Today I am not my accent +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++iior choice of meal. I am a black stain +++++ion a white […]
Yesterday, a man walking his monkey on a leash kissed my cheek offered sweet potato ice cream. A flavor I’ve never tried. This note— Please burn your bread at the right toaster. Temple sign teaches what to say before I cross the bridge: careful of the footing because the responsibility cannot be assumed about the […]
On Seeing Swans at the Embassy Suites I wasn’t expecting swans. You were partial to dark corners oaken Algonquin lounges smoky with cigarettes and specters, stories we spilled across the bar, but that night you offered swans their pearled splendor indelible, dappled promise of what our lives together could have been— long necked beauties swimming […]
Find, if you can, the brightest stars— her right shoulder, the toe of her sandaled left foot, one on each of her hips. Her halo has gone out. Stars flicker on and off from her lifted wrist, her right hand raised, index finger linking with thumb, blessing the shining northbound lane. How exhausting to be […]
In trying to reach the other side of whatever separates us—blue expanse or two fingertips inches from bridging— I have become as much an anchorless boat rowed too near the horizon as some great vessel moored a lifetime in the shallows. If I could speak what is missing by silence alone I would have already […]
Half-dark, extra mild. I pass these words to the cashier standing behind the bulletproof glass. She returns those words to me with a tone change, eyeing my buttoned shirt ironed as crisply as my speech free of twang. Shot through […]
Here is the street where we shop for ammonium and cabbies deliberate over paper cups. They work the hours of risk from gunshots to breakfast. When a motorcycle manipulates space to crash spectacularly, a woman beyond the circumference of wreckage turns to her man: Why won’t you detonate with me? We are restless, we travel. […]
chlorine is one of those smells that reminds me of home and the first time i tried to kill myself how if you were one of those kids and i was whose parents dropped you off at the pool because it was cheaper than summer camp you know an indoor pool is one of those […]
and I ate all the sweet potatoes. I’m sorry. The raspberries, the honey, that locket you gave me. They’re gone. I was so hungry. I ate the metronome and the black bear skull we keep on the bookshelf. I ate the books. I ate the empty frame on the wall. And our bed— the mattress […]
a child unearths a charm I gave to you. Sand weathered the face of St. Michael into a tarnished silhouette, the vow cut into the silver on the back no longer reads “more than my own life.” A whisper of distorted letters remain as estranged to this child as we are now to each other. […]
in this whiskey bottle sky night the sidewalks purple greased with moon flooded poplar shadows: I walk toward hummingbirds’ wings, the morning green: snapdragons, daffodils trained to bow by an earlier rain: toward the kimono flutters of a water’s edge. John Walser, an associate professor at Marian University in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, holds a […]
Women draped over pianos like spilled drinks, wearing push-up bras and corsets, trying to become long-stemmed wine glasses. A midget in a black suit paints shadows on the floor; he has Peter Lorre’s eyes. Breath smells like cheap scotch, men with broad shoulders and smoke for bones sit at the bar and peel their squints […]
And you cause all the horses in me to hurtle their shoulders against stable walls purpling hay with their thick dripping hunger bruising black boards with their crescent moon hooves And you cause all the kites in me to sing as they singe in the bright teeth of lightning fluttering paper dissolving to ashes twisting […]
After he was gone, she looked for him to return, perhaps as a bulldog, a stag or tusked-boar. She did not expect this parrot, perched on her sill, preening and carrying on conversation. Flying, it seems, exhilarates him, and he enjoys the perspective on earthbound life. Treetops and leaves create a kind of jazz with […]
for Will & Howard * * * Walking Lower Wacker in Chicago, we debate how strictly vegan you’ll raise your son as snow melts and fills the shoes we all, January ill-equipped, have worn here. Will’s yellow sneakers, Howard’s loafers, my bright green Adidas. You will raise, your son, the one […]
Forget this aging maw of yellowed keys, more flat than sharp, beating wrong notes on twisted strings. Ignore the film of dust on the wobbly bench overstuffed with music no one plays or even cares to hum. Avoid the bad keys, the ones that stick and stutter, the ones that are ashamed of being silent […]
The gravity of Sambuca alters migration patterns. Yesterday, a name smacked against the window, the bleed of each letter a trickle. Today, a comma guts the hot water heater. Refrigerator shelves pang. Tomorrow is a phone booth with a broken door. J. Bradley is the author of the forthcoming graphic poetry collection The Bones of […]
You hear them on NPR, read them on websites, store them for cocktail parties and first dates. Every second: a hummingbird’s wings flap 80 times. Thunder rumbles 1,100 feet. Four to five people are born; two die. At least 100,000 chemical reactions fire in your brain. You lose about three million red blood cells; your […]
1. The cardboard box is longer than wide, wider than deep, and it’s dragged out into the middle of the floor where a team of six adults is given the task of opening it and assembling the contents (a bike) 2. In this instance a small group of adults is given twelve pieces of uncooked […]
Uncle Roger is at the bend again, right on the rim of the road before Cow Camp runs into the Newland Tree Farm. He waves at my car as it drives past, but he is in the sunset. I wish I were older, sitting with him, with no place to go but wherever my feet […]
In the attic, I cut off my Ruthie doll’s blonde hair to make her look more like me, to see if her golden locks will grow back. She wheezes when she breathes. I pick two broken crayons from the floor and scribble on her left cheek the blue-black of a bruise. She recoils, looks up, […]
I hold the remote just so, it feels like her indifferent wrist. Television is the oven I rest my head inside. My own tragedy splits in two when the TV star’s fiancée is stolen by his evil twin. (Same actor, but the evil version is somehow more handsome) Our clubbed hero wakes, wanders the new […]
In our house, I wake to the random rolling of R’s in a sing-song voice, mom’s voice, a terse and rapid repetition of th-th-th-th. In our house, for her, this is prayer and if I go to see about breakfast and her eyes are closed and she’s wailing the answer is cereal. Do not worry. […]
the sky rolls by acres & acres of blue wind swept sheets dappled by skeletal wisp teased cotton clouds clumsy footed down here I collect the teeth lost on my last bet never was a good gambler golden days behind me the cold whistles through dark pines brooding on my ass gumming old wounds in […]
Asphalt meets gravel like a mountain birthing a river, an alarm clock. A truck lugs shaking crates, the bed secure as boulders smoothed from running engine parts across three states: mountains, desert, water. The path plays a georgic game, plows mud divots. A recent storm set traps for anyone who slows emboldened into pastures long […]
Since a man in a car over a centerline changed what we mean by sister your eyes are ashes in my palm. I can only think of your hair now, the red of our father as a girl I wanted to put my hands in its clouds. That man we shared, half sister you knew […]
when voices hush, the night lies down, tucks itself under a bulky plaid quilt. you’re wrapped in sleep, snoring lightly, as coco saunters in from the rain, meows, disappears behind an armchair. i get up from bed, move hastily about the room like a thief, stuffing a sweater, a scarf, two nectarines into a rucksack. […]
The stage too can be a disguise. The light catches the glittered bow in your hair and the auditorium is all sparkle, no shadow. But everyone knows that shadow is where the living happens. Where loss cuts its teeth on our lungs. The acupuncturist who lives down the street says our lungs are organs of […]
“With strangers in your line?” – Marina Tsvetaeva, from “New Year’s Letter” I. Into and across my words must travel, yet they stop, then mix up within each other. I want a spare, clean line – I am so warm and so thirsty. II. You come from a place that is different from my place. […]
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