7.1 / January 2012
Two Stories
Letter to My Jewish Son Who Thinks He’s Black and Went to Live in Ghana and Now Regrets It
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A father never disseminates bad advice, not intentionally, although bad advice happens far more frequently than one would like. So what if there’s no electricity? You used to sleep [...]
The Sodomized Dictator
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In the night after the killing, Ali washes himself in a bowl. His wife comes close and takes his hands, slowly stroking them with hers. The bowl is filled with red water, but Ali is not bleeding. Something stands between them now, they both feel it but [...]
Green Man
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There on the screened in back porch. Steel mesh screen rust smell damp on her tongue just after the sun goes down. Gumdrop standing there just tall enough to see over the whitewashed lathe and through the screen that keeps skeeters out. White flannel nightgown with tiny [...]
Viral
No one tells you, when you first begin to talk about having a baby. Naively, you think it’s about love—and it is. But not just love; it is also about so much more, and not all of it is quite so fuzzy.
Here’s the truth: parenthood is a relationship based on [...]
Domestic Violence
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Carl is lying in bed half-asleep with the side lamp still glowing when the girl appears at his bedroom door. She is wearing the white undershirt he loaned her while her travel-worn clothes are in the wash. She lies down on her stomach with her face turned [...]
Feet
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Because he’s sixty-five years old, weighs five hundred pounds, and is mostly retired, my father is learning how to levitate. He claims he’s managed to float a few inches off the couch when he concentrates hard, but that only happens when I’m at work in the shoe [...]
Two Poems
OF NOTES
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More like autumn than autumn is.
Settling gravel and moonlight, and a campfire
feels its way into the dark.
They used to burn coffee to cloak
the scent of death.
One little two little three little.
Bike racks. Fire hydrants. And all the little boys
allowed outside
unwatched after school.
The skeletal remains of a [...]
Blue
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The porcupine girl was born with a full set of quills, softened by amniotic fluid and slicked down by placenta and blood. The doctor didn’t make the usual announcement, and after a few moments of infant squall, he said with practical Southern gumption, “Good thing she wasn’t [...]
Four Stories
Farm Town: The Wolf
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Disguised as a lover, he was all clover. Dressed as a December hunter: a genuine risk. He waited me out in the snowy hedge. I said go home, predator, but he became a Compulsive Visitor. Knock knock he called with his teeth. Knock [...]
For Provisional Description of Superficial Features
THE SURFACE OF OGLE-350c, like so many other superearths Sevin and Vulpes had visited, was composed of a mixture of crumbly xenolith and light, rubbery, frozen organics mounded like ice cream—if ice cream were ever black, and piled into geologic deposits that stood weathering in a thin corrosive atmosphere for [...]
At the Off-Ramp
They had too many drinks at the motel bar, which overlooked the freeway. She had never been there, but her ex seemed to know it. He asked for a specific room location at the back. They weren’t hungry, so they went to the room on liquor and peanuts. There were [...]
Blackbox
Blackbox lies at the bottom of the ocean where the fish are blind and the waters dark and muddy and where lie scattered the bones of ships and sailors of the seas and of the skies. Once, after a sudden event in another world, many things descended here. The sky [...]
Back-story
The real story isn’t starting yet.
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Chelsey likes things she shouldn’t like. This morning, while waiting for Lloyd to honk his horn outside her house, she stubs her toe on her armoire and finds the pain kind of nice. It’s uncomplicated, easy to fix. She likes the simplicity of [...]
Two Poems
YOUR BLACKNESS
black feet, black bill, black breath
the crow tells me I don’t know
I don’t listen
warn them hungry my branch back up stuck-man fly away
I don’t know the crow I don’t have time
step pluck babymouth wind
The [...]
Ten Poems
You as Insulated Travel Mug
with stippled belt which is where
it’s most natural to grasp you
off a morning, that house in LA
it was cold with holes in the walls
and I thought how, your doors always open
(in one sense); our blood
was not the same stuff and if
I handed [...]
The Inexact Nature
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Not sure how to begin, I will say, during college,
for seven months two fellow freshman
ran a prostitution ring from their dorm.
The building from which they operated,
brokering a kind of ritualized surgery
wherein the young pressed upon the young
to relieve valved pressure, was a neo-gothic affair,
architecture which surely cast [...]
Two Poems
THIS IS THAT
Let’s start with certainty:
Life is this and then that.
To reach the next thing, I’ve found,
one must reduce to the simplest
nature institutions of a flattening scope.
We hazard our own metaphors.
For instance consider the mind:
a cliff, whittled by high entropy.
Or language, behind the tongue:
a web, host to more than [...]
Two Poems
Elope
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I stop feigning virginity in the A.M.
God had found us traversing New Mexico
byways, His breath smelling of brimstone.
Evangelists hailed the airwaves all night,
mouths pressed to microphones
for the devout dressed all in snakeskin,
repeating: like greedy hungry lions
that see their prey, and expect to have it.
We rambled through [...]
Distant Early Warnings
distant early warning (abbr.: DEW) noun
a radar system in North America
for the early detection of a missile attack
1. Upon Reading Another Report About Setbacks Nearly Three Weeks After the March 11th Tsunami Engulfed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant
For this day, there is a cloud-cast
thick as the clotted [...]
LETTER TO IREDELL FROM THE YUCATÁN
Jamie, once again I’m strumming the low
latitudes, plucking dark lines
like harp strings—oblivion’s
tropical melody. All morning I’ve been drinking
the wide blue sky: cliché heaped upon cliché—
each atom complicit, each molecule a temple
of triteness, a dull world.
But this green sea is a global original,
an inimitable canvas. And beyond the epic
reef that stretches [...]
Two Poems
the pilgrimage of mouths
My throat is a winding staircase
of stone, where words pace up
to my teeth’s narrow apertures
and dare jump. Other nights
I choke on their clumsy catapult down
into the roil of my belly, a cauldron stoked
by slow sipping a 12-year Barbadian
rum. I approach the decade with eyes
focused ahead, squinting to [...]