7.05 / May 2012
Post Apocalypse
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Mom talks to us through a tape-recorder during the final summer before, which she believes, the world will end. I lie awake most mornings and wait for my sister to wake up so we can listen to it together. Sometimes it takes hours, but I like the [...]
The Beautiful Nature of Venom
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When we met, you whispered in my ear, your breath hot, wet, and heavy with whiskey, that you wanted to know the feeling of my skin under your fingernails. There was lace around the collar of my dress, and I wanted you to take hold of it, [...]
Three Poems
Warning Silo
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I’m from the future, not 20 years from now
when I’m a general commanding the new
continental army, overseeing
the government’s time travel
stuff-No, I’m from later tonight. I slip
into a worm hole or a cosmic string
when I hit the gravel ditch off I-94
in the middle of a [...]
It’s End of the World Karaoke
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It’s End of the World Karaoke at Big Daddy’s and Lara takes a photo of herself for Facebook before she goes on stage. She’s holding a basket of nachos in one hand and her phone in the other. After she takes the photo, she says, to Javier, [...]
Two Poems
Nation
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Walking down the street feels clogged with embarrassed millionaires. Holes in the shirts, holes in the soles in various silver plated denominations. Assured of arrivals, shipping magnate inventories, most favored nations. Melancholy picture settings set afloat in obsolete instruction manuals, sliced delicatessen. [...]
Rubbing the Elephant
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Three brothers are blind men
groping an elephant. The first
says the elephant’s skin is their father’s
ashy elbows. The second
says the elephant has ingénue eyelashes,
like their mother, while the third feels
that the elephant’s substance lies
in its heavy middle. The first then asks
Where is our sister? No one knows.
In the [...]
Try My Shank
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You’ve been one-legged since the lasso trap. Your personal ad says “Kids: undecided†even though you desperately want two.
When the maître d’ shows you to your blind date’s table, you are pleased with her prominent forehead and symmetric face. She has potential.
Before you can sit, her eyes [...]
Giddy Up Hannah Montana
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Allen Wonkin was an emotional man, but he didn’t know how to express it. He sat at his desk, thinking what was the best way to be emotional, but all he could do was scrunch his nose as hard as he could and then twitch the side [...]
Recipe for a Winter’s Day in Three Courses
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Starter
Smoked meats,
nitrate free.
Local cheeses:
Peppered goat cheese
from Colrain,
Franklin County Camembert.
Good bread.
Pinot noir from southern France,
Languedoc region,
in 50-cent Goodwill glasses
etched with wild geese.
There are two birds
on each,
endlessly flying one
after the other
over tall grasses,
again
and again
as I turn them
in my hands.
***
Main course
We had an extra glass of wine,
the windows steamy,
snow falling
as [...]
We Act
We are a band of girls, and we run the sidewalks. Like the boys who used to run the sidewalks across town, we use guns. But unlike the boys, when we need to make an example of someone, we do so personally. We’re skilled with knives and wire.
After the incident [...]
Eureka, California
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I knew you’d be angry when I climbed up the colossal statue of Paul Bunyan.
We were on our honeymoon.
I don’t know why I did it.
We were driving up the narrow highway, and the morning was just coming. You were buying doughnuts inside, and I was watching through [...]
Tiny Christ
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It feels as if they have been in here for hours. Outside, it’s hot, an aggressive midday heat, but the stone is cool, the respite welcome, even if these corridors, these shaded cloisters, seem to wind on endlessly. They pass by one murky shuttered chapel after another. [...]
Crown for a Natural Disaster
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Tonight I’m too stupid to write a poem.
Who knows what poetry is.
I know:
My voice is too pronounced.
My pronoun I is a needless gnome.
I fall asleep in the spelling quiz
and sink to the shipwrecks in fathoms below.
On the Titanic mosses grow.
The moon has been renounced
and burning tigers pounce
right [...]
Two Poems
The Curse
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I pray this thorn pushes through me
into you. I ask poison to press
upon your palms and knees. I hope for
your permanent brown. Let the universe
feed you stones until your garden grows
sick with weeds.
The Cursed
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I awoke with snow in my mouth, diamond
snakeskin between my [...]
Five Poems
Circle of Salt – October 28
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If you are my bright protector. If water can ever meet wood. If a coastal forest. If I lived there. If I made a trail of salt to follow. If it did not dead-end. If the windows of your house opened on [...]
Dead Alice
Joshua’s dead girlfriend has been sending him postcards. He puts them up on the wall above his bed, even though his mother asked him not to tape up posters because they would strip paint off the wall.
Boyfriend, she wrote on the first one, I wish you were here. All my [...]
The Ninety-Sixth Day
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Laura was not released from Ray Leopold’s basement the next day, or the one after that. She and Andy staggered their sleeping schedules so they would have a few hours alone each day. While awake, Laura and Andy talked, argued, picked each other apart. They shared their [...]
The Clepsydra
A woman crying full of pleasure through the wall
Hands plastered on the plasterboard
I know that sound
She herself often leads me to the kitchen and then
Props me up, groaning, while I kiss her neck.
The whisperings of girls, smiles, sweet deceptions
Are not what they used to be,
Those thieves of wretched make-believe.
Our souls, [...]
Three Poems
DAY 30
Any routine is always the same but in between you could cut the space for my breastbone with a sword & fail to make contact with
*
When we walked together in the suburbs, in May, a single sparrow resonated in twenty-two different garages. The stink of apathy carried with it [...]
Two Poems
[A Letter Written to You While I Am Away]
each year the river sinks lower and I have been
nowhere new
save for clinics and their board game
rooms that rattle
in my head like dice
flashes of only men with overgrown
beards they have forgotten
their beards like dead farmer’s crops
but I remember them clearly
those men and [...]
Four Poems
Fort-Da
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I would fog up your glasses tonight if I still had lips,
David said to me on New Years Eve. It was
beside the point that he did have lips, beautiful ones:
this was a third date and we were beginning
to make a world. Driving through Trinidad
in the first hour [...]