After a certain hour buildings don’t make sense. Lights from across the street resemble nothing, my footsteps knocking on uneven stones, not bothered by their own discordant melody. I would see different people in different rooms, hunched over desks or gazing out at traffic, a phone nestled in the carapace of an ear, mouths shaping […]
weigh her down. New York collects under her fingernails as she adds more stones during the eleven-block walk from work. Jane reaches in when groaning cars lurk beside her. With every Nice ass, baby she sends chunks of the city skipping across hoods and through windshields. Tires screech and she takes off running. Jane arrives […]
The Distance On the subway platform, that man with tissue stuck to his chin once lived at the crux of another woman’s dreams. She knew him in the bitter back of her throat, femoral pulse, pop of her ovaries. But now, between them, clear cut of forests, parking lots, hinterland where generations live entire lives […]
What housewarming gift is best for someone moving into a townhouse that will be under scaffolding and tarps for a year? I hope to get Evelyn Lau’s Living under Plastic. She writes poetry inside quiet places…
This never means the same thing twice. Tonight our children sleep in the backseat. Their heads yield left and right through the country, the moon a cantaloupe slice crowding Cygnus from the sky. Under that pinoak I crept, kissed a boy in porchlight pallor, picked grass from between my toes. By the juniper I snuck […]
A biker sped by, pushing 70, with bugs in his beard and grease in the crooks of his elbows. Miles of grime on the plates left him stateless. In the bitch seat, more than a weekend’s packing and two tiny flags where familiar thighs should have been. He looked like an old man, but he […]
I thought about leaving you. But you didn’t. Why did you treat me so badly? I was testing your love, but those days are over. I was a cigarette under your heel. You inhaled—admit it. If I said “stop,” you heard “more.” I thought you enjoyed a little rough play. Besides, who had who in […]
In Cedar Lake conservationists have planted fish attractors along the gravel bottom, in the hopes of building a sustainable underwater environment. We are not thinking about science, Jonny and I. Instead, we troll the shallows of Shellcracker cove. Beyond stoned. Aiming for anything clueless enough to snag onto our clumsy hooks. While I bait my […]
I was walking back from a parade in my hometown when I saw a house on fire, or it had been, was smoking itself like a cheap cigar. I went inside, no one stopped me. I was very attached to this house. I found small scraps, discs and ovals, of sheet metal and began […]
The world got wavy like that cheap trick in movies when a character dreams. It wasn’t a dream though, because I was fat, and my best dreams are when my girth disappears. I sat on the couch, heavy in the head, my wife learning Thai, the language program spitting sentences at her. Is the man […]
The gods’ hammers strike your eardrums. The vibrations shiver you from sky to earth. Your roots spread, gather voices into your trunk, where blue and green meet to create the symphony of the planets and the song of the worms, the whole Whitman universe rotating to the pulse of your sap as it rises and […]
“This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you.” -Adrienne Rich You ask me how to spell “ain’t” and I want to write “a-i-n’-t,” those malleable scraps of sound welded into a graphite fixture for you to hang portraits upon: Momma’s scalded hand shooing you to the rhythm of “ain’t gonna […]
The one I seem to check into twice a month, greeting the desk clerk who never reciprocates. I walk up the rickety stairs, suitcase and life in hand and enter my room that makes bare bones sound voluptuous. I prop a pillow against the wall, sprawl out on the small bed and stare out the […]
She brings shampoo bottles home. I don’t remember if she did or not, but I swear she brought the sheets home too. I probably decided to build a fort. Whenever Dad was home, he lets us eat junk food, watch Tales from the Crypt. John & I didn’t mind the dark. Mother was always frightened […]
Only one chocolate cake in all the land. Only this one Sunday. There was some startling blue. White caps. Only at this window where the loch lives leaping in its song. Minutes before, sheep turds. I have a blue plaid wool coat. Father in a suit. Mother in navy or beige. Forty more years until […]
Fingernails turning blue again, you remind yourself in a few months this will be just another moment on just another corner in just another winter you reference. Of all there will one day be a cure for, this isn’t on the list, this quick catch of breath in the chest as you glance up the […]
All-American heroes in flames, my right hand a god controlling the world’s freedom while my left hand presses the knob of the aerosol bomb – Aqua Net in all its hot purple splendor – slips, and Duke and Snake Eyes nearly collateral damage to Voltar’s char-bubbled plastic skin. No miracle will get our mother to […]
1 Love is the heart’s Jiffy Lube. 2 Love is the dawn coming up like last night’s chili con carne. 3 Love is blind, hearing impaired, and bi-polar. 4 The language of love has 32 different words for “laundry.” 5 Apostrophe to love: ′ 6 You see blossoms when the trees are bare? Leave some […]
Remember when I snapped at the sight of a sparrow? That plain bit of nature reminding me I can’t grow tomatoes or live without a microwave. I worry about the Strait of Hormuz. Will there be gas for the trucks that bring us our cool ranch Doritos? What about those coffins and swing-sets on TV? […]
Every night the train rattles along the West 4 Street platform
like some futuristic bull pushing archaeological trash
through the catacombs of the city.
Which is a word that means ghost, as it wanders, so much blown trash, soulful only as you make something of it, interrupting its leanings, a physical event and vulnerabilities, of buildings and populations. Budgetary allocations are patterns, they originate in the popular will and the dirt pressed back, or down, it’s so much work, […]
As I was walking through the Springdale Mall somewhere outside Pittsburgh down into the belly of the world, I made a word my friend with my breathless mouth. No one knows why it all turned upside down to keep both of us amused, in chains, and capable of saying anything — as […]
Tell her goodbye when you see her because sometimes it’s best to start with the ending & work in reverse. I know a thing or two about phases said the moon after no one asked it anything at all. I feel bad about the things that I said but also whatever I didn’t. Tell […]
Their pilot Mulligan was only crazy for golf, practicing his swing whenever he could: on the tarmac, in the air, and even while fleeing North Korean groundskeeper cells. Otherwise, plenty of rest and fluids made his world go round, granting the energy and mental acuity to tackle each day’s tasks, like diversifying his retirement holdings. […]
Even if I did not dare invite anyone, I still wanted a party—the fountain downtown to change times, a saxophone to start noodling out of nowhere as I crossed the street past mine or simply a friend to sit me down at the table of pressed-tin under the striped awnings where chestnut trees […]
She was three, maybe four years old, ages away from maps and schedules, timers set to govern how late or lost she’d become, how partially found among hours that went by dark and undiscovered. However, her touch mechanism was already fully formed, activated at birth—the rest of her life would be fine tuning the […]
Through autumn leaves that lift and drop like birdless wings, perpetually rearranging the Public Garden, my daughter cartwheels and sings. Tourists and policemen on horses tap their feet, clap, toss coins that tumble through the brisk air like brass and copper buttons popping off a worn coat. The attention makes her sing louder. […]
Acting on the belief that anachronisms are talismen, he rode Helvetie’s old elevator (3 people max) up and down at least three times Once he got off on the wrong floor Another time he got off to ask the night porter to uncork a local bottle (bought down the street at Mosca Vins) […]
Take myself. To know coeur. As us. Tonight. The thorn of to have— What was done before the knife’s plunge. Without breaking the I am for you. That is no pain. Before the sting of flesh, imagine— To be played in the round. Plosion into fragile am, nor along the slightest edge: forsake our collaring […]
Grandma didn’t always hang with a football team, sometimes she played hockey or ice-skated with Chinese waiters. It was rumored she went skating on a date twenty years after her husband died. She was a tall, peculiar bride to Louis who strolled near Orthodox Jews who came to her house to perform miracles. […]
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