without permission or probation. if you can judge the pedigree of a windy day in April you may just get this. the same boy endless and radiant and doing exactly what a title as smooth as shea butter would suggest. sprinting across what little grass the west side has to brandish the opening of the […]
She wishes she could beat the dust mites out of the rug of this world. But she’s a woman, and her body is the inherited fabric men wipe their boots on, woven and patched by generations of furious women. Her hands are an ancestral tree, she names each branch of herself on her fingers: wife, […]
Most mornings I deliver my child into the arms of strangers who will lead him through passages papered in apples and rainbows, pencils and stars, each holding a single name, the names’ owners a crush shouting cascades of syllables, furious energy heating the room, swallowing my joyful son. Not safe to play outside today —shadows […]
Three minutes before the mudslide, I sit in the gardenshed of you— woodrot, pardoned given to the carpenter ants. I peel at plywood, name my body a townhouse built to be the walls of someone else. One minute after the mudslide, I am asked to qualify what happened give it a name: this […]
Picture the big windy-soft midcentury rain rinsing the windows of the San Fran hospital where it’s the goofy John Cage’s job this afternoon to babysit a roomful of kids whose parents just doors down are dying, so silently with his spindle arms he mimes first a fast breaststroke against the window’s water then, even better, […]
I That spring I counted hydrogen ions, followed waste through porous membranes into silent bio-soups, waited for the nucleus to wake. It was late in the last century: pale blue moons and sugar cereals, Baghdad statues coming down, anti-aircraft tracers loverly in the amniotic night. II Can you guess where I’m calling from? The county […]
“look, we don’t know each other, but we don’t have to—” just give me your careless, normal hunger— i know we saw each other on that gay app we won’t ever mention out loud irl— i’ve served you the coffee breath that lives, sometimes, in another man’s mouth— you’ve seen me bloodshot and rude— maybe […]
I never think of my uncle as a man with rabid mouths burgeoning inside his skull. I’ve never seen him draw his teeth like burning hatchets or pull dead wolves out of his head. I’ve heard the stories; man leaves the hospital door ajar & wakes up peeling mothwings off a hospital floor. Man removes […]
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.
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