Work Tagged With ‘audio’
These Poems with Kerosene
1. Better That Way
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2. Everything Must Go
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3. Man With a Suitcase
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4. Monstertruck
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5. Nightriff
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6. Woodbourne
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7. Hobbies of the Damned
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8. Friends
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9. Brokenlight
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10. Grace
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Misanthrope
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I hate the sound of the human voice
as it bursts from the radio
at sunrise, when yellow holds its breath
and pretends again to be orange.
Daybreak: blood in the palm of morning,
prison-soap pink spilling onto the horizon
in the so-what of dawn.
I hate the sight of the human form
casting [...]
Two Poems
Lake Country
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My father married
a native. She looks
like clay. Like the land.
She looks
like a history he loves.
*****
You’ve walked well ahead of me on the trail
that ends at the highway, past the inlet
flooded with spring. Next to the creek nailed
to a beech tree is an inscription I always catch
you [...]
Life of Jo-Jo
1:Life of Jo-Jo (Suburbs 1988)
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Cloudless skies, the haze off the blacktop. Man, what else? Wave and snap. Like five feet of latex tubing, and I’ll say we did it so many times I could see the tubes curl, ripple at the ends, the crack that sent those [...]
Four Poems
City of Motels
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In the neighboring room
is a reel to reel, looping
a recording from some SoHo party
circa 1968.
Jaundiced Polaroids drift like leaves
through thick-carpeted hallways—
everywhere, these
people-echoes.
After it all
what isn’t memory?
At midnight
a desk clerk calls, saying
“‘You’ stands for
‘I want myself back.’”
The ice machine
mumbles its slurred Latin
and tonight
I am the littlest [...]
Self Portrait
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Leo’s wife Margaret noticed that the only self-portrait he’d given her was the one of himself as a woman. Why? She wanted to know. Why that one? He assured her that it was the only one of himself as a woman so far. For her best friend, [...]
Daughter
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Step One:
If no one answers I will leave this message:
A daughter runs down a pier, over a rail, into a shark’s jaws. Suppose I am the shark. Suppose I say, “Is there no life I would not save you from?”
I am asking the wrong question.
I should ask [...]
Doritos
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after Cassandra Gillig
We had a great run but everything got fucked up and flooded, and you know that. There wasn’t any place to go so we sailed, you and I. I said, I love you. Baby, we’re the last people on earth. I smiled a big, [...]
Smyrna
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By a strip of highway spilled beside a swamp
that exhales sphinx moths and hums mosquito hymns:
their kids sack out on sofas while the men
make sweatless love to tired wives, then go
perspire in oil-smeared, orange hard hats
on caffeinated graveyard shifts. Days off,
they jaw across their truck beds lined [...]
The Boys of the Midwest 1 through 5
The Boys of the Midwest 1
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The Boys of the Midwest grow up dirty, covered in earth like recently dug up root vegetables. They don’t have eyes until they reach 12 years of age, and even so they run the cul-de-sacs of their neighborhoods in groups of twenty [...]
Euclid’s Postulates
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1. A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points.
“Nothing works until it does,” the mechanic says, but my Mazda remains indifferent to such wisdom, stubborn on the side of the highway. It’s 6AM and I could use something sweet.
“Chetty D” rubs a rag over [...]
Two Poems
TOURISM IS IMPORTANT
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THE SHERRIFS DREAM
Nightvale’s town criers have cross-stitched their mouths shut and stapled their eyes open. The benches are all broken. No one sits down anyway. No one can fit their broken wings beneath their cloaks. A skin condition that makes its [...]
Right Velmy
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There was once a woman called Right Velmy, who lived in a small, crooked house that sat upon a hill. Each morning, a fog swirled up the hill where her crooked house sat. The fog swirled as high as the windows and it tapped at them. This [...]
Our Master of Psalmody
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The neuter down the street, Lee, is a master of psalmody. He used to sing her psalms in church, with liquid, heartbreaking grace, and women swayed flat-heeled shoes; men nodded thick necks; everyone shone. For years, he was quite the church highlight, and yet, unsure of which [...]
Oatie
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He shave in long slow pulls; tighten his face so the blade can’t snare up against the skin of his neck, seventeen inches thick like a bull. He watch himself in a mirror fragment jam up against a knot in a twisted tree, hold fast at the [...]
Two Poems
Biography of Teenagers
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We’ll write our biography when we’re teenagers
and before we grow into our teeth. Before we meet
people who will laugh at us for reasons we’ll talk about
when we’re older and you’re divorced and I’m divorced too.
And we’ll both still know our exes because we have to
and [...]
The Last Hurrah
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Anna and Henry Sidell fly to Athens, Greece, a trip they planned several months earlier as their last hurrah before parenthood, from their hometown of Raleigh, NC, where Henry works at a local television station and Anna sells perfume part-time at a department store. They get off [...]
Plagues I Would Not Wish Upon My Enemies
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Plague of Left-handedness. Plague of British Teeth. Plague of Magician’s Assistants. Plague of Loons. Plague of Control Freakedness, of Quaint Rusty Farm Tools, of Loved Ones-Spurned or Otherwise. Plague of Puissance, Plague of Beached Whales, Plague of Stock Tips. Plague of Materialism, of Wants, of Spontaneity, of [...]
Three Poems
On Learning to Open My Eyes
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The brightest sky is a blindfold stitched
with black rain. I think of the dog pacing
by the back door. Control clocks the moan
sprinting past the flinch, how her teeth
make me dream of doorbells crashing screams
into a quiet house. I once [...]
Iao’s Strays
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I’m watching you watching all those cats and what I’m seeing is the big fight that happened here over two hundred years ago. All the blood and bodies that filled up the valley. I’m watching you ignoring the green walls that I swear are creeping closer like [...]
Two Poems
Inquiry into Coil
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Enough of obsidian
and enough of fine linens
and figs, let’s thrash
down onto a maelstrom
of tusks, a madman’s
pinbone blanket.
We’re not woodmice,
so let’s roil around
properly like a den
of prairie vipers.
It’s too brilliant
for all this formality,
let’s clamor loud
enough for our echoes
to frighten the wilds.
Inquiry into Architecture
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Scavengers in the Boneyard
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They come for us with their hacksaws and pipe cutters, their chainsaws and drills. They brace themselves, boots on the rotting pier, and bore into us with their shrieking machinery. We submit to them. We let the yardmen strip us down to our rusted guts and watch [...]
Cut Like Me
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Baby feet kick her ribs but she still had all of them not like Adam. Her organs busy knitting baby limbs, rows of stitches can’t drop a stitch they must be perfect. Back when she was a little girl her mother folded her wings bought her hoodies [...]
Failing to Convince my Nephew That It’s OK to Fly
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Alanis warns of Mr. Play-it-safe
whose first flight ends in demise,
and I think my nephew Jacob, fifteen, autistic,
might grow up to be like that guy,
though his first flight was this fall
to my brother’s wedding in Ohio.
Jacob wet himself rather than
risk getting up to use the bathroom
with its toilet [...]
In Lieu of Questions
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Among the lessons you ask, this one
about the tongue-what I hunger for
is not the only territory. The body exists,
surrounded on all sides by currents
of nothing, this suspension we call late.
Over the flame, you break chocolate
from the bar. No words, just the sound
of the gas, [...]
Three Poems
NEW ENGLAND OEDIPUS
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With eyes that debrided sleep,
he’d been the only sound on this side
of New Hampshire, except for
a cough somewhere, the lisp
of a kite in perfect wind, snap
of a stick, what went unsaid.
At home, her ash hairs spread
like tinders, dimmed
L’s receding, skeletal.
Fall would be thin this year.
This [...]
Three Poems
gay boys and the bridges who love them [II].
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saw it with my own headlamp.
lit halogen filament, breaking
between a thirteen year old’s haunted
hands, costumed in our realest ghosts.
we went door to door. unwrapping
hard candy and hard boiled eggs.
mouths of spray cans melted around pins
so the shaving cream flew [...]
Two Poems
I THINK THEY KILLED MATTHEW FIELDS
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It was when the neighborhood cats followed me home that I knew Suspicious oven drippings Even the abandoned patio furniture is dark and gummy I think the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling is code Besides too many hairs sugar the bathtub I [...]
Trade Secrets
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Whatever is placid plain you acid wash and cover, let simmer & smolder & set, those idle places we hover over. All elbow grease can smack alike onerous, egregious, can’t it, ingrained to grind & groan. You pine for pain, set your face for it. Fealty [...]
The Wearied Cords
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Henry Smith. John Fleet. Their names meant little to my mother and so she would comingle them, if she even bothered to call them anything. Her apathy was echoed in the maps they made. My home has been recorded in English as, variously, Nacotchtank, Nacothtant, Nacostine, Anacostine, [...]
Eastward
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As you open the apartment building’s cracked glass door for the first time in sixteen
days, unbutton the top button of your shirt. That’s better. You looked like a religious girl with your shirt closed up to your neck that way. One more button now. Show the people [...]
Equus
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During sex, a herd of spavined horses
runs through my body and out
my mouth. You just roister, lover,
never see the andalusians
on the sheets, palominos
vaulting the bedstead. You don’t
hear their hooves cantering
arrhythmia inside me,
mistake their sick whinnies for breathing
at orgasm, the froth from their mouths
for my own rabid dampness, [...]
Pool
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Early autumn, I go on the narrow path that extends from my backyard between two apartment houses to the fence surrounding the vacant lot. The dandelions haven’t died yet, but more of their yellow heads have grown gray and fleecy, so the path is grimmer than in [...]
Surname NASA
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Grandpa had a chin cut from solar flare,
his arms felled comet tail,
his mouth full of Hubble lens teeth.
Nothing broke him, not the bricklaying
or bread crumbs, not a love wanting to see the size
of its shadow. He held all the quiet of night,
all it’s dark in the [...]
Three Poems
The Wolf
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After love he cannot hear the wolf
lie down outside our bedroom door
or feel its wild ache twisting through the mountains
inside me, this bed a terrace empty
of heaven’s marble figures. No twice-
barricaded walls or sky full of hollows,
just he the blind shepherd counting
drops of moonlight with [...]
Four Poems
I Fall in Love with Every Attractive Woman I Meet (#5)
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There’s a space between us, I shout, but Cammie thinks I’m speaking in car-lengths. Above us, an aluminum net sparks & whirrs. We pin a young boy’s bumper car into a corner & laugh like Kansas is [...]
Pym’s Story
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Pym’s second cousin fucked her when she was still a girl, is where it started, apparently. He visited frequently during the tender nub of her pubescence. Then, Easter, 1998 or 99: years blur into each other like letters at the optometrist. Pym’s mom woke before dawn and [...]
The First Thing the Stupid Bitch Does is Fall in Love
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Second thing she does is slide into heels so high she doesn’t have to stand on tiptoe for shit.
Third thing the bitch does is throw every appliance into a snow bank. They’ll still be good in the spring.
Unsure what makes her stupid? Take this five question quiz [...]
Two Poems
If My Housemate Fucks With Me I Would Get So Real (Audition Tape Take 1)
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I didn’t come here to make friends.
Buildings spit their stomachs at me
and I spit back, down the sidewalk
into a bitch’s hair. I am a forehead
careening in clouds, a dirty tree branch
brushing against the [...]
Self-Portrait Absent Impulse Control
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In the television commercial
for high-tech wheelchairs,
the woman is basking
in her new-found freedom,
gazing improbably
down the Grand Canyon’s chasm.
I want to reach out with my finger
and push her over the rim.
If a tree falls in the forest,
it’s because I’ve chopped it down.
One strike of match
and the flaming meadow’s mine.
A [...]
Body Language
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There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
-Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitasâ€
We are eating cheap pizza & drinking iced tea from styrofoam cups under fluorescent lights. I have told her only that I want to talk [...]
Two Poems
Here are some of the things I’ve learned since losing my virginity:
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My girlfriend shaves in so many places!
Holy cow! I’ve only ever shaved my face
with an electric razor, not a blade, because
I’m afraid of them. And I’ve never shaved
my balls, I would probably cut one off! For
cycling, [...]
Land of Afflictions
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For some, affliction is a badge. They have always worn it, affixed to lapel or strap. Their moans of pain could easily be mistaken for pleasure. Others make of themselves a house with different rooms. Here is my clawfoot tub, they say. Here is my bed. Here [...]
Two Poems
Mail
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Dear Mrs. Thompson,
Sorry if you ever tasted the salt of me
when you kiss your husband good morning.
I hope it didn’t taint your coffee
or make bloody murder of your lipstick.
I killed your marriage, and you
deserve to know that
he is not everything you prayed for,
but maybe his sweet kiss [...]
The Wake She Leaves Like a Whirlpool
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Something must have happened between then and now, here and there, because Imogen has been ignoring my smiles. It becomes clear I’ve done something wrong when she pulls my hand from the small of her back like a plug from a sink. I washed your hair earlier, [...]
Melanie and Edith
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The exotic fish were dead. Death should never come before noon. That skinny red headed guy who sold exotic fish told me to be careful, feed the fish regularly. He didn’t have faith in me. How could I go back to the fish store and tell him [...]
Three Poems
Boycott trinity
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Is it possible to be a man with a friend. To be a man about it. SHE licks my hand and what I give her is thusly sticky. SHE licks my hand and the whole sidewalk falls from the fervor. Man with a friend watches me [...]
Three Poems
he gay
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my tum has bage in it – a seedy kind.
but it’s fine, my big slick cuz slobs all time:
pretz, peppy, sweet tat fries. no, teddy, you
can’t tag him, he’s my shined bargain find. true,
once chewed tushy takes on pooh. eww? ooh? well,
no b.b.g. gon’ stun holey [...]
Asking Where
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Sex
Maybe he only took his dick out and the rest of him was clothed except for my mouth a receptacle trained to put the light through. Be at the beach one day for me to find you. Place your dick in my mouth none too gently in [...]
Float
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Say you have a daughter who’s a junior in high school. Say she is head
of the homecoming committee making floats. Say they decide on a float
where the school mascot, the Pioneer, shoots their rivals the Wolves.
Say she tells you she needs several colors of crêpe. [...]
JUST TRY
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Don’t worry,
it’s just gender dysphoria again.
It’s just changing planets,
like we’re only so far
from the sun as it is:
Why shouldn’t we be unhappy
with these bodies?
I’m not famous enough
to be doing this alone,
but God if I knew any other way
don’t you think I would’ve been the first
in line to [...]
Two Poems
HUMPADORI JACK SING-ALONG
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Kindly do not forsake this world of jack,
this world, our steady candy in which we don’t do
jack. Is there a one who
would not hang with us, who
would not instant merge, ride up,
and swallow
whole the highs and lows, who
would not sing and stroke the [...]
Bottomless Pit
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What if Tom and Huck Fucked?
Someone has spray-painted “What if Tom and Huck fucked’ on the wall of school. Tom thinks they wrote it to drive Tom and Huck apart. Huck hopes Tom wrote it because that would be amazing. But no, Huck knows, this graffiti happens [...]
Him
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HIM annotated in my ancient files
HIM who brought forth teenage hallelujahs
HIM a sly snicker and Brooke Jensen Rainy Night in Georgia
HIM a big man in his soft heart and [...]
We Were Bad
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When she fucked me we imagined we were fucking other people, like Jane, for example, from our chemistry class, with the soft round calves and the horn-rimmed glasses, with the thin ankles and trembling hands. When I kissed her ear and talked about Jane’s slender wrists, her [...]
Transaction
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He’s passed out four times so far. I had a go at him for not sleeping well the night before, not eating properly. He answered with narrow eyes. Had a performance to do. Twenty feet of slick black tarp and he still managed to spit blood on [...]
Ghost Pianos & Idle Hands
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”Every day, it’s a-getting closer, going faster than a roller coaster…
Every day, it’s a-getting faster, everyone says go ahead and ask her…â€
-Buddy Holly “Everydayâ€
A man, a woman, and her child, all walking too fast through a carnival. Jacki, a young Hispanic woman with that sweatshirt and black [...]
my wife & william
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2
perfect
strangers
leave the bar
& walk the sea wall
arm in arm.
he’s known only
as william
& he stinks
pleasantly of pickles
& gin. i’ll wait
until he enters
my wife.
i’ll wait until
he’s done.
then.
Parricide
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Michael was almost to the gas station that didn’t sell gas. They sold out-of-date groceries and cold beer. After that he’d best go see Greenie Blake. Better he explain things than let someone else do it.
Sumerville, North Carolina, had plenty of Blakes and none of them worth [...]
Seven Poems
My Choppers
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are negotiating
with what remains
of my mouth: chew this
slowly, you fool; too sticky,
idiot; asshole,
that side no longer exists…and so on.
Sugar has eaten parts of whole.
The ride of word passion bloodied sanity.
I’ve fucked with the odds; they’ve rendered me
a chalk horse, scratch, even money
to be turned into glue
anytime [...]
A Brief Rupture
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The girl had been cycling home from evening tuition, a thing she did this time of day almost by habit, without thought, without worry, her path always taking her down those same, quiet one-way streets with low walls and lonely old women hobbling home. The sun had [...]
Gone to Water
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It was Karen’s intention to drive Nicki directly to the hospital. It was absolutely her intention. But the hospital came and went with a missed turn, and then a wrong turn, and then a strange overpass looming up in the road where Karen doesn’t remember an overpass [...]
Three Poems
Eat Something Warm
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When struck by illness, the body
is the culprit of its actions
like a wet toothbrush.
They say the body clinches
and grinds its teeth while asleep
when the body is overtaken with stress.
The body is culpable for the stress,
too, guffaws the dentist.
The body says:
you remind me of myself when [...]
Ripening
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My sister always looked even more beautiful when she ate. Maybe this was why my father preferred her, something I first noticed as we drove back from camping in Montana, when I was nine and Lila was 14. Our parents had bought a flat of cherries at [...]
Whore’s Bath 1921
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Try not to look so used. Dash of soap between the legs,
a moment’s scrub and call it clean,
then check your dress for any tears or stains.
It’s hard sometimes to sleep, so rub a little lipstick
on your cheeks or swipe a bit of chalk
around your eyes. You’ll look [...]
Two Poems
Swamps
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When they drained the swamp water
from his ribs, they found a chewed bit
of heart, strung with seaweed like a locket.
They folded it in his suicide note
and gave it to his son, who gummed it
until his teeth grew in. He aged
with his daddy’s eyes, bought a house
by the [...]
Two Poems
RHINOCERI
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We can agree there is a time for honesty
and then there is a time for honesty.
This is one of those times. Honestly,
that night on my parents’ roof after
we’d bought the condoms and made
our pacts and you asked if I was ready
I said yes, that I was [...]
Pork Pie
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“I’d like a pork pie,†I said to the old man behind the counter.
“We don’t have any more today,†he said. “We have chicken now. That’s it.â€
“Then I will sit here until you have pork pie,†I said.
“We are closing in fifteen minutes,†he said.
I looked at [...]
George
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The two threads of your lips push together, then jump to meet the pinpricks dotting your pupils, dancing above the luminous shirt as soft as your skin as soft as the hair on your arms, your ears perfect like little spoons opening, onto the white wall that [...]
Anthem
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There are the boys and girls with India ink tattoos. There are the boys and girls who wear black. There are the boys who swim in city pools during heat-waves, pools with names like Italian gangsters, watched by the girls who suck on sour-apple [...]
Spaces We Can’t Live In
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The summer Mikey Cotter moved into his uncle’s house we built a fairy city out of mouse bones. We put twenty traps in the woods with cheese and peanut butter and caught nineteen mice. We hid the mice up on a high shelf in the storage closet [...]
Dead Girl
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Late that fall, a young woman was killed on her bicycle outside Lola’s apartment while riding in the rain. Lola was buying coffee across the street when it happened, saw the grimy dump truck and heard the screaming. And that night in the hallway, her neighbors surrounding [...]
Fever Dream
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I. Fever
Pastel streaks bristle thick and harsh behind eyelid veils, where everything spangles red, kinetic static. It is drawing shapes and they revolve. The heat radiates both away from and towards her. It would be pleasing if she could find a position from which to endure it. [...]
Four Poems
The Movie My Murderer Makes
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My murderer has stalked me my entire life. He stood beside the basinet the day I was brought home from the hospital. And there he was again at my first birthday party. My parents must have thought he was a distant cousin they [...]
Two Poems
What We Bury
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After she left the second time
I spent my nights
in front of a glowing screen
watching women undress
down to her shoulders,
her breasts,
her hipbones,
crying and pulling
at my cock, hoping
to sever her sex.
And when this did not work
their shoulders
broadened, their breasts
shrank, their hipbones
became like mine,
and I watched men
pull at [...]
Getting There
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Jenna stared at the fading orange and black tattoo on her ankle. It was poorly done with too-thick lines, and people often thought it was a bee, not a butterfly. The monarchs that inspired the tattoo had arrived thirty years before, on her fourteenth birthday. Jenna’s mother [...]
A Whole Mother Story
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This poem is also available as a PDF to preserve the poet’s original intent.
—-
Once [1] upon [2] a [3] time [4], there [6] was [7] a[8] mother[9]
1 Once: An understatement, a lie. Best to start false and work your way around.
2 upon: Taken abstractly. Not the same as standing upon on a table or traveling upon [...]
Hamster Babies
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Threads trail from the stuffed elephant’s face, and a bit of cotton peeks from the fresh wound. I pry a button-eye out of my son’s two-year old fist. He is unwilling to give up, and he surprises me with his strength. He shrieks when I take the [...]
The Importance of Believing in Mermaids
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Mel and her friend Kaylie are sunning away their innocence, their legs lined up and waiting behind them. Mel reaches back and adjusts the bottom of her American flag one-piece, which, we discovered this morning, is too small. She’d cried and said it was a baby suit [...]
How to Make a Faux Lunch for Two Children
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9:00. First, try not to be late for preschool kiss & play drop-off. Even one minute late, you might have to parallel park your minivan, and you’re not so good at that. You might bump into that pole by the edge of the sidewalk again, and your [...]
Nine Babies on Ice
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We have a cohort of children-one for every reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh, an entire baseball team of kids.
Caleb hates mashed peas, Rhea perks up in the afternoon, Geo is a future astrologist, Jase sucks her pinkies, Ariana is near-sighted, Ty prefers to be alone, Will has a [...]
Ten Things I Do Not Tell Anyone About My Child
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1. I love her the most when I am drinking my morning coffee at work. She is at school. School is over five kilometres away. There are no grubby hands hanging on to the hem of my dress. There are no crayons and lopsided stuffed toys on [...]
The Book of Manners for Mothers
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I am not supposed to say “Make me a sammich, bitch!”
Not even in jest.
Not supposed to say “Baby got Bounce.”
Mothers are not supposed to
flash peace signs
break into spontaneous Douggie
or use the interrogative “Dude?”
the statement “Dude. Seriously.”
or the exclamatory “Duuuuuuuuuude!”
Nowhere in my Book of Manners for Mothers
does it [...]
At Six Months
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I feel the eel of her
skim the undersurface
of my skin. It’s
alive. Now, I imagine
everyone I meet emerging,
rumpled and wet, betwixt legs.
The birthing room dank
with the breath
between screams.
Shrill.
We are bonded,
those of us who have, for whatever reason,
cried together. The cords between us
variously thick
and glistening. It’s tough
to be alive. [...]
Methode Champenoise
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This poem is presented as a PDF in order to preserve the formatting.
Running Late
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You are running late, always running late to pick up the older one at daycare, and it is five dollars for every minute passed 6:00pm. Which is already late enough as it is, but there you are again, trying to do one last thing in the office, [...]
On Our Rwandan Refugees: A Memory
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Zimbabwe, 1994
You have to remember:
sometimes a man does walk
out of the sunset, at first
staining the dark lily fabric,
then growing and becoming
a noise, a need, but it’s not
until you see one arm clearly
the red eyes, the paper skin,
not until you hear him ask
if you have any water [...]
Two Poems
The Mecosta Burnout
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The sixty-seven Falcon, black as a court date suit,
shudders on the blacktop as mohawked kids pluck grubbies
from the puddled run-off that washed away
the curled skins of tire-treads.
The driver cracks her suicide-door like a Tall Boy.
The hand she raises can’t close from the busted jaw
she [...]
Three Poems
THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY CHILDREN
for Oliver
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I could smell the sea salt, when they brought me to the ship, and my mother’s perfume, and underneath that, more salt. She led me down holding my hand, gave me to the captain who would take us all to our [...]
Uuo
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Presented as a PDF in order to preserve the author’s intended formatting.
Three Poems
Amber
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She’d been looking everywhere, then Lisa,
an apparition in the hallway, and him
two seconds later, the smell.
She knew just what question to ask-
Lisa in the passenger seat, untied shoelaces
bouncing with each road bump- Where were you
and grandpa?
They tore her apart on the stand-
Look, I know I’ve been a [...]
Maria in Drag
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Chica had no visitors, but once received a Bible in a brown box. Color coded text, red was where Jesus came in. She spoke His lines aloud as we ate our nails. Jesus liked the lame girls. The dark girls, field hands and whores. So Chica went [...]
Six Poems
If I Leave You Then Maybe I Won’t Have to Miss You So Much
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Lately I keep things
just to throw them away: practice,
practice. What I mean is, I’ve had enough
longing, enough of nothing
ever being enough. Look how the earth
shrugs its mountainous shoulders, how the cows don’t blink
unless there’s [...]
Call & Response
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When did you know you were gay?
my boyfriend asks in bed one night.
And I tell him it was at church camp,
age thirteen, when David, the boy
in the top bunk, shook our beds
in what he claimed was a nightmare
sent straight from Lucifer, the fallen
angel himself. I know now [...]
Between Them
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There is an old black and white photograph of
my grandfather and his brothers on the farm.
They are all strong men with thick forearms,
forceful, tall with rounded bellies,
bursting beneath dirt-crusted overalls.
I am not like my rough and muddy ancestors,
who churned boots through cracked fields
and pulled barbs from dry [...]
An Apartment of Women
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She just happened to be. Her anatomy was coincidental. Each breath could have been another’s breath. Her hair lost its way growing. Laila knew no way to go forward that did not involve sideways.
She found Nan or Nan found her in just such a confusion. Walls not [...]
Five Poems
Note: These poems are made from New York Times articles published one hundred years prior to my compositions.
Human Eclipse
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A candidate made a bet with several
contesters today that he had the biggest
mouth in the crowd and to prove his
assertion, thrust a bronzed heart between his jaws.
But it fitted [...]
Little Beast
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Margot kept things from the dig. She had a rusted fork that, when she touched its prongs to her tongue, tasted of done air. A tooth, a rib. Whose, she didn’t know. She didn’t trouble herself with ghosts. A rip of shirt, dusty soft. Blue leather, but [...]
A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us
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(0)
The space between me and my brother
has always varied in size and volume (1):
its dimensions
are ever-changing (2),
have bent and expanded,
transcended literal confines (6),
opened new spaces (3),
abstract spaces (4),
have functioned
as a membrane (5)
that wraps itself around our bodies
like the well-tailored clothing
worn in the 1950′s (7)
without ever actually [...]
Two Poems
Dear Jeny
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I know this is your name because I read it on your embossed name tag.
I’m writing this down because I can’t shout loud enough to tell you over the noisy rattle and bang of the paint mixer and the customer assistance in aisle 12b announcements.
I want to [...]
Three Poems
Size
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My mother kept old love letters,
pulled them out to show me
how they smelled of men’s cologne.
She told me of size and circumcision.
She told me my own father was small.
She timbered around our house,
her body now the size of a hollowed-out log,
a sprig when they married.
Sex was something [...]
Four Poems
Victoria’s Secret Says: Be A Summer Bombshell
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Take your paper dolls swimming and drown
every last one. Spend a week bleeding
and two sucking on metal keys.
Spread your painted toes
across the dashboard of his car.
Scale metal gates that pinch your armpits
like alligator teeth. Turn
your skin into a slip and slide.
Someone [...]
Three Short Essays for Aubrey Hirsch
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“These muscles,†Says He
Notice what you eat, and you will find in it the taste of your own flesh…
-Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibalsâ€
I am new to eating animals, newer still to poultry, and preparing to cook my first whole chicken. I rinse the bird; my small kitchen [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Five Poems
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Her Disco [5]
(she who) tightens the throat
equals
(she who) causes the throat to breathe
equals
our scorpion queen. Our meat
run rampant run equals
bhū-: to become, to grow
equals equal.
Equal equals becomes, be.
The angle of incidence
equals
the angle of reflection.
We gather at her,
the oracle of her, & are
reflected.
Genesis
on a brown plain straddling
hands on [...]
Blown
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Nothing beats the Everglades for swallowing a body. A life. It can ruminate for centuries on secrets taken whole. It can absorb the bitterness of treason, the gallstones of deceit. It devours castoffs, bolts down indiscretion. Its appetite is legendary, a burial ground for saints and sinners, [...]
Boolean Napoleons
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Presumably, I work in an office. The space is full of office signifiers such as cubicles, coffee makers, and personal computers. In one sense, I suppose, all these signifiers mean that this is an office, in the way that a theater stage meant to resemble a living [...]
Los Reyes del Barrio
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Am tired of doin’ the same shit. Of packing up drugs an’ burying guns. Of selling coke bags an’ cleaning the twister bikes. Of watching the ravaged kids scramble like rats on roof tops, tryin’ to find something to steal, to trade for paco. Poor shits can’t [...]
Salted Wounds
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She crushed the grains of salt against her body, imagining the gritty hiss they might make as they broke apart. The granules left long, puffy red streaks on her breasts and belly, as if someone, many someones, had tried to pull her apart.
The skin rose in angry [...]
Jana lives in this house,
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the one with the missing and broken windows, the one with the collapsed front stoop, the one painted pink and tilted like so and surrounded by the gnarled oaks of Texas. She lives alone. And this may sound like a public service announcement, but Jana doesn’t need [...]
Corporate Birthday
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It was Mike’s birthday. We had a special budget for such matters and our department’s assistant bought a present. By the shape of the package one could easily deduct that the gift was of literary nature. My boss called me and together we took the package to [...]
Two Poems
I Pretend Sometimes I am in Love
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Come sit on my couch.
I sit in the middle so our thighs touch
and you will secretly like it. I like to close
the distance before there is distance
like a train that never leaves the destination station.
I don’t like change.
You shouldn’t give [...]
A New Person
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Please, no pity; these are facts.
My admission was immediate, unchallenged. The facility made exceptions. I renounced my name, possessions and liberties. I was allocated a private room – it was proposed as a temporary arrangement. At that point, no ward would have me.
Information was fed back slowly, [...]
West
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When Stephen Linkfelt was headed to his locker to retrieve his father’s M14 semi-automatic rifle, Cal Jones was in Art History getting ready to ask if he could visit the restroom. It was game day and as such Cal, West High’s three-year starting Quarterback was dressed in [...]
A Man Gets Tired
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When Sally drank Sally got ugly. Didn’t matter where we were. Could’ve been at the White House for all she cared. She’d get a couple shooters in her and start speaking up. Talking shit to anyone who’d listen. Got me in a few scrapes along the way, [...]
Why Things Fall
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Priscilla led Isaac by the hand outside, walked him to a tree, placed his back against the trunk. She pulled an apple from between her breasts and placed it on his head. She told him to stand perfectly still. Priscilla strode twenty paces away, turned, [...]
La Muda y La Tonta
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La Profe, Dulcia de Mendoza, paces in front of the children, her long hair a swaying pendulum, her name a fitting tribute to her inherent sweetness. Aileen wondered if the dark smudge on la Profe’s cheek would be hereditary. She would pass it down to her daughters [...]
Moving
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1.
It was a long ride. After we pushed our bikes up Laurel Hill, I was drenched. We maneuvered through the front door, dumped all of our belongings on the floor, and saw that there was no space to lie down. It was our first night in his [...]
Self-Portrait as Sex Addict Chained to a Rusty Heater
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-After Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan
Miss Mayella says There ain’t no better cure
for the blues than good pussy,
and I guess she’s half right, but I prefer men
when I elbow-crawl through Magnolias,
crushed cigarette butts.
Just-shucked corn.
~
It’s this awful itch, a hellfire born from
my memories in heat.
~
Lazarus claims God [...]
In the Heart Library
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It turns out there is such a thing as a heart library. It is housed in the basement of a medical building behind a dining hall on the campus of a large public university. It is maybe a secret. There are no signs that read Heart Library→announcing [...]
The Deaths of Max Morozov
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The first time Maxim Morozov died was in his mother’s womb. She hadn’t known that she was pregnant with twins, until just before going into labor, when she cracked an egg into the frying pan and found it had two yolks. There were complications during the delivery; [...]
Crowds
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It’s a lights out kind of thing with strangers gathered naked all around you – clasping each other’s hands and genitals; a glowing growing around their eyes because there you are too – nude, tiny, suddenly feeling like a child, but for what? These are instances of [...]
The Lights
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The lights have been with us a long time. We have all decided what they mean.
In groups, when first gathered, we receive direction. We are asked questions about lights. The lights we like best will be mirrored by one hand rising into the air. Our bottoms will [...]
Graduation
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The old man flew in from Florida and is staying with the family. The old woman drove from Omaha and gets a cheap motel room. Their daughter is happy to have them there for her son’s graduation but distraught that the old woman will not sleep under [...]
Two Poems
epitaph #17
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here lies a man who once stood beneath an orange maple on a day in mid October when the National Weather Advisory had proclaimed that there would be winds and low humidity and therefore the perfect conditions for fire, and right there above the deceased’s head, [...]
Babymaking
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Season One_______ ___________________________________________________________
The Pact
Three middle school girls make a pregnancy pact. They are bored and they want attention and unconditional love. The first one, Bridgina, does it with Wendell, her boyfriend of two weeks, on the school bus. A few weeks later, she pees on a little [...]
The Sex of the Stars
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That cluster of stars over there-and when I say “cluster of stars†I mean a set of stars that are not clustered at all, but they appear to be a cluster to a human viewer on earth who can’t see perspective in outer space-
-anyway the stars in [...]
Life on the Dead Tree
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They were not reptilian, though from time to time they did flick their tongues. They were a boy and a girl, resting in the forks of branches: brushing their hair with twigs, ripping bark chips from the source, always with the tree tissue, the mineral deposits under [...]
Sex Education
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It was spring in Indiana when that man raped
the gray-haired lady who went to worship
with us. The one who wore purple skirts
and sturdy tan shoes like loaves of day old bread
my father brought home for us. The man snuck
into her house, tied her with a phone cord, [...]
Three Poems
UPON LIVING WITH A MAN NEWLY RELEASED
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A friend watches me spoon a soggy chunk
of my childhood and fling it
somewhere between my Brooklyn sink
and California. Her thoughts brake, as if to judge
the remains of a six-car pileup, or the sink,
jammed with crayon drawings of my father
in jail. Father, [...]
Say When
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if you are a man made of birds
if you are a bureau
if chest, if cage
if you are a lovely weather
worn out, say when
if the space between us makes
a dog named vacancy
if I contain all possible crimes
if I pay attention, if I stay very still
if I notice how [...]
Blue Alyssa and the Sad Gray Crab
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“Thursday’s child has far to go…â€
We called it the Cape of Flowers, but for every bug-eaten bloom there were forty thorns and twice that number of saw-toothed weeds, and a grit-patch mined with sandspurs made the only path to the sea. The sun was [...]
What Hangs Up, Must Come Down
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Peter orders his eggs over hard so he can assure himself the pleasure of clean cuts and small bites that never endanger his shirts or hands of a yellow yolky smear. When he orders them, he is fully aware that some people think that he might be [...]
Five an Hour
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My first day on the butterscotch line, they tell me I can eat five chews an hour.
Frank says, “That’s more than on the taffy line.†Frank works across from me. He and I box the butterscotches, fifty a box.
“If they’re so worried about money,†I ask, “why [...]
Hikikomori Romance
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“The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare defines hikikomori as people who refuse to leave their house, and isolate themselves from society in their homes for a period exceeding six months.†-Wikipedia
I- SEDUCTION
The girl, animated, big eyes on TV late-nightly, the one you took for wife [...]
Three Poems
Cotopaxi
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-After Frederic Edwin Church
I ask the campesino where he got his hat.
I have trouble understanding his response
as he rushes past pauses and breathes between
his words, chest heaving, his accent slanted north.
I do understand that he is confused,
is trying to find his way back to Sonora.
He doesn’t [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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
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 [...]
Blue August
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Years ago, I loved a boy named Mathias, a film history student who did coke when he was feeling expansive. At the time, I found this aspect of his behavior normal, yet I imagined film criticism to be a kind of mania. My references were actors, not [...]
The Golden Deer
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I am always lusting after golden deer. It is my fate, my demon. Technically, the Golden Deer that Ravana used to lure Sita away was a demon, but that’s not what I’m saying. Or maybe it is. My best friend isn’t drinking anymore and she’s always talking [...]
Two Poems
The Day Before Yesterday
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It didn’t take much
to rattle our small world.
A dependable sun each morning,
the people we knew.
When we woke in our groggy beds
the sky was gone, obliterated
in humid August fog.
We went walking anyway.
Heart Pine barn hulking
over our shoulders.
Mist a bell-mute, deadened
what we might have said.
The [...]
The Rematch
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I was not a pretty girl. Or thin. I was, according to Master Kim, head of the Kim Do Martial Arts Studio, the toughest young lady he had ever seen in his class. I was eight years old. My chubby cheeks and a nose the shape of [...]
In Fairytales
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In fairy tales, women seldom look
behind the unlocked doors, preferring to open onto secrets
which after all are women’s territory.
Folded away with the sheets, washed
out of the sheets, or left to stain. Bluebeard
had many rooms we never saw, such as the dining room.
The servant’s quarters.
A cloud of [...]
Dr. Moreau’s Pet Shop
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“Is there such a thing as being ‘fresh out of rehab’ when it’s your sixth time?†Annabelle asked as she settled into the bucket seat of her convertible, coaching the B-list reporters who followed her after she’d signed herself out of the facility. “Maybe say ‘rotten out [...]
A Sliver of Sky
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We have been sitting watching it for eight hours now, that thin sliver of sky. Grandfather has wrapped himself in old sacks, the dusty canvas sends out little puffs of chaff every time a raindrop hits it. His hat is pulled down low over his face, and [...]
In the End, When She Looked For Novelties of Fact, She Found None or Are You There Galileo, It’s Me, Jane
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When pressed, Jane will not admit that she is obsessed with Princeton’s former M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science, Thomas Kuhn, author of the seminal work Structure of Scientific Revolutions. She will only admit publicly that she thinks, were the circumstances different, they [...]
An Extraordinary Adventure that Befell Camilo Roldán in a Trailer
for Constance Penley
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EXT – NEW MEXICO – NIGHT
Green pieces blown into reflective angles, the Milky Way is a tree, innumerable signal mirrors.
I stumble out of my trailer into the parsimony of cacti surrounding my house and themselves with barbs. Tequila breath and bong hits watching Star Trek [...]
Two Poems
Man Dies While Building an Opera House
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The crane tips. Slowly at first,
as if time might triumph over gravity,
as if the pointing and oh-my-god-s
of the workers could form a hand to damper
cacophony’s mouth of cable and steel.
But the crane quickens, slips the man like a drop of [...]
Two Poems
ROBOTIC COMPATIBILITY
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You are not like the others before.
Your connections are not bent, your filaments
Are clean, your nand gates snap shut with conviction.
I’ve been attached to a dozen other units
And never before have my registers been so
Electrified with the thought of working
Input to output, output to input,
With any [...]
The Fifty-Foot Woman
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Five Feet Eleven Inches
Karen noticed the thinning hair on the top of Sam’s head, and the image captured her attention to the point that she couldn’t focus on what he was saying. She’d never seen him from that angle before. When Sam left the kitchen, Karen stood [...]
Four Poems
AndalucÃa I
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When I see Alejandro I do not wear shoes. Because the sand is soft and the soft is always expanding and he likes to look at me! me flickering through all of his rooms, watering over his garden and shushing his child and reading books
I do [...]
Drug Facts
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First Time/Four Times
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1.
we planned to lose our virginities
that afternoon. Rashell said she got off on it
how a boy’s body rattles
more than pumps that first time
he hula hoops in a woman’s valley.
we suckled her, all teeth and unclipped nail
calves gone mad for mother’s milk
she laughed. why did no god stop [...]
Then Come Home to Settle
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They called them the Curdies. This white trash family always came in and asked for free courtesy cups so they could split a refillable Coke six ways. Once they were out of the lobby, the employees would all grumble: “Annoying,†the ticket taker would say. “You know [...]
Dream Without Hands
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I’m walking, half-waking on my way home,
I’m reaching out my hands before my face
Noticing how soft the skin between my
Fingers and the patterns in my own hands.
It glows like amber. It scours my neck.
The grate in the fire, a net for scorched limbs.
This flame grows on its [...]
Four Pieces from Wake
In addition to reading the poems below, you can enjoy them as a PDF that better preserves the writer’s original intent.
Strawberry Gash
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When my dead sister and I stop leaking and we are inside my dead sister’s mouth. And she works up a good amount of spit. [...]
Four Poems
THE GENIUS GOES TO THE ART MUSEUM
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He enjoys the entrance the most, but not because of the gift shop. He already owns hundreds of magnets and an impressive coffee mug collection that crowds his counters and lines his window sills. He started collecting mugs to hold his [...]
Disappear Behind Us
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Before we began a brief and terrible relationship, when we were new friends, John took me hunting. It was shocking to everyone that I did it-me, this small, liberal, artsy girl. Me, who had never touched, never seen a gun before.
We didn’t kill anything. We were ready [...]
Jerking Off
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I.
I have to admit that mechanically the term
implies a dick. Some grippable skin circumferance, some
handle, a thing which can be jerked on. (Off.) Fuck it.
I don’t have to admit anything. Consider my hands. Jar
lids. Bottle tops. Screws and seals of all kinds. When I
was twelve I learned [...]
Vitamin E=MC2
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& the explosions expedited the eradication of mountaintop pornography, somehow suctioning batches of bad cocaine through the rebels’ nostrils. Still, they were ”winning.†You behaved glowingly, despite it all, in our room above the gas mask factory: smoking electronic cigarettes like a battery champion. Humming like [...]
Every Tomorrow
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The soil, it dreams of one day the wood. The wood, it dreams of one day a tree. When the tree the heart, &the heart a sun, she that whispers in prayers the telephone sings &she as if all of this would every tomorrow &she [...]
How to Age
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Materials:
Fugue, jar.
Procedure:
1. Trap fugue in jar.
2. Dismember the chords.
3. Extract the melody.
4. Bury the notes.
Four Poems
Almighty
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His twitch. His gaptooth. His meathook hands. His whiskey.
His cocaine. His lie. His momma. His lie. His girl. His lie. His lie.
His mask. His blame. His finger-point. His backstab. His loyal. His game.
His drunk. His spill. His fool. His freeload. His pass-out.
His breath. His dirt socks. His [...]
Lowndes County, GA
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A fire, they say, down in the paper mills. In the field, a cradle of spined nettles. A forest of ferns unfolding like mittens in the push of late evening. Four tight-chinned women ferry supplies toward the town, floral dresses catching noiselessly on ribbed thistle. In the daily [...]
Pictures From the Coast of France
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Three days after I found a high-quality photograph of my father’s penis, captured on at least ISO 400-speed film stock, laid out over four-color spreads on pages 56 & 57 of the Swiss export, Der Körper, I broke up with my girlfriend and made plans to leave [...]
Fortune’s Conjecture
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x#=??(x)pi
i=1
order of operations
On the day of our wedding she couldn’t afford a dress. I borrowed a suit from a friend and drove to city hall. When she took my last name, it meant forever. It was addition: the happiest kind of math.
We moved six [...]
Crumbles and Gumbles
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With his left eye clamped on the brass monocular and his right eye splashed with sea salts, Christopher Columbus felt the sting of a long, drawn-out mistake. Seven months had it been already? Eight? He had etched a tally on the wooden plank above his bedpost with [...]
Five Poems
A Worm
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A weird worm crawled into my heart
And It said, “All of your thoughts are
Not true thoughtsâ€. The tongue tastes the air
and the air tastes like sawdust. Grey crowds of
people crumble on the sidewalks.
Now the sky is purple, and a misplaced thread of
Woven blue. Somewhere in the [...]
Two Poems
THE OTHER WOMAN’S VOICE
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A moment like that-you hearing me-
would have an actual, defined sound-
no right hand noiseless pulling, typing
hurriedly, or muffling over the phone.
For once, there’d be no time difference,
no limp excuses of long hours at work,
that woman hovering around you, lack
of privacy, or pub crawling with [...]
A Map/A Method
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THE WOODS
Me and her, we go into the woods behind the park on the north side of town, past the crumbling statue of the district’s founder. Me and her, we go into the woods behind the park, past the people walking their big dogs. Everyone [...]
Songs from the River
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I was the first to notice the water pooling in front of the staircase. I looked up, but didn’t see any watermarks, no sign of a drip from the high ceiling. I soaked up the water with towels and buffed the floor with lemon-scented wood polish. But [...]
Three Poems
Birth as Agathism
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First, we’ll say: O Mama-cow, milk-giver, how your legs
scissor apart. How your hooves twitch in dirt.
We’ll say: We will drink what you give us.
We’ll say: How we could eat.
Then we’ll say: A nose! A muzzle!
We’ll say: Of all your yellow juices, none of them
like nightmares.
(We’ll [...]
Five Poems
They Must Bake an Awful Lot of Cakes
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Try venturing out beyond the searchlights and see where it gets you. I remember when it was Gerry out venturing beyond the searchlights to see where it’d get him. Remember we didn’t hear from him for two weeks [...]
Presidents
The Jeffersons
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On the living room set of The Jeffersons there is a man and a woman and another man who becomes a man named Lionel when he stands or sits in front of the camera. Lionel mostly stands, though, because for some reason he can’t just sit [...]
Self-Portrait as a Cubicle
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Keep me clean –
that microbial oval toilet seat,
overused, turned
ivory with occasional
drips of yellow,
a Jackson Pollack
on periphery.
*
Keep me sanitized -
says a sign – laminated
with ripped corners,
narrating how to spread
sterilizer evenly
around the curve.
*
Unbuckled, pants
down, knees
bent. Starts
the waiting for enclosed
ongoing.
*
On my body,
there are words, drawings,
phone numbers. And
a [...]
Excerpt from In One Story
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In one story, the two sisters were Shel Silverstein and they wrote a book about a Giving Tree, which was the old man they were both in love with.
In their book, the old man was giving and kind and befriended a young boy, in whom the two [...]
Three Poems
Pussy Fucking Fingernails
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My nails were no longer pussy fucking nails, so I bit them off. Then I put on red lipstick. I shaved just one side of my head and let my hair down. I wanted to construct a half three-piece mod suit, half body-con bunny dress, [...]
No Relation
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Luke stares into the lot through my bedroom blinds, telling me Ted will track his ass down. Must be good to know some man wants you bad enough, you feel the thirst thirty miles north. Thank the good and wonderful Jesus I’m so fucking plain. Every weekend [...]
I Invest In Elephants
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he has a wide body. it could crush an elephant.
i’m 42.
he had the need to reveal his age. his hair is thinning.
he sells commercial real estate. it is interesting talking to a man
you know can kill you with his hands. you would like to be fucked
by someone [...]
I’m Really Quitting This Time
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(1993-1994 San Francisco)
“I look at you, I am unable to stir, I struggle, I am unable to reach you monster.â€
-Monique Wittig
Bianca was a dapper girl-boy: tall and lean with fine brown hair and Colorado snow skin. Sad grey eyes that pulled me home when I curled around [...]
Sucking Famous Dick on the Rooftop of the Omni Hotel in Downtown Austin During SXSW 2011
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I really want some smoked brisket on the stroll. Some soul watering pulled pork tacos, BBQ beef sandwich, a Frito pie from Stubb’s, meat sticks on the street corners, deep fried skins with melted cheese and chili, grilled stuff from the food trucks. Wide eyes, it’s my [...]
Five Poems
THE ARROGANT MAN (MY MAN)
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In which it was half habit then half necessity to crowd the middle: the tent walls brayed in the wind.
In which I believed we’d staked everything down or if not locked half in the trunk.
In which we collided in half sleep.
In which God, [...]
Poem and Short Fiction
Poem for the Apocalypse
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Everything’s cute these days
like that Liz Taylor stencil shirt
at Houston and Broadway I want
even though the artist has completely
disappeared, or like discovering Jack Spicer’s
detective novel in the library stacks
Why don’t you people tell me
about these things? Why can’t it all be
like Nadine and The [...]
Tonight, Tonight
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I still hate the song. He fucked me
on the comedown
from his Boston ‘e’ party, quick
and neat as a well-done
execution. His young stubble
grazed my shoulder,
he feigned sleep when someone
knuckled his door.
The most romantic words he knew
were all right, let’s go
but I drew them in like his soft
imported smoke.
Later [...]
Six poems
Amie
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Clotilde found me in the hayloft, sticking straws under my nails. She saw where I’d scratched a broken cross on my wrist where veins sketch a blue delta. And she shrieked, the cuts smeared with blood. Qu’est-ce que tu fais? T’es folle, Fernande! What could I say? [...]
Out Cleaning Up The Scene
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We settle at the bar, our eyes hooded, hard-ons rising behind suit coats. A shot a Johnnie, we say to the barkeep. We’re sweating. We’d stopped to admire half-slips made of lace on plastic male torsos at Slipwreak. Then quickened to the bordello, hurrying past Pearls, a [...]
The Empty Place
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Houston was forty-two and going to seed. He had gray in his hair and mustache, and his mother, when complimenting him, had stopped calling him handsome and had switched to “distinguished.†For the first time in his life, he felt old, and by consequence, a little bit [...]
One Man Ponzi
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True, an oak smashed the roof, and mice cracked the cinder foundation, but, Sonny, aren’t you bored of balancing checks? Your brow’s furrowed, your eyes, puffed. Remember back when, when you ducked into ducts to slither from cops, and smoked dope in the tunnels beneath college quads? [...]
Unholy
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after & for Roger Bonair-Agard
Dear Roger,
I’m laying on the sweetest stomach this side of Newark on a Saturday night trying to listen to her insides when I notice The History of Church Music sitting cool on the other side of the bed. The pages are [...]
Gary
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I once befriended a guy named Gary, a pale, skinny guy with sideburns and a quasi-bouffant hairdo, a guy who wore soccer shoes and jeans and shirts bearing the emblems of German football teams, a guy who’d been living out of his car and on the floors [...]
Ninibe and Tyyrhenus
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Ninibe was flipping through a positively ancient magazine when the doorbell finally rang. Now she was nervous. She got up and checked herself in the mirror; like always, the face and the body she had would have to do. She wasn’t a robot, and she wasn’t [...]
Pay No Attention to That Land Behind the Curtain
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I. The Night Before Deployment – Topeka, Kansas
What makes a king out of a slave? Courage!
What makes the flag on the mast to wave? Courage!
- The Cowardly Lion
I leave for a war that budded off into a separate timeline after we raised the victory [...]
Beautiful Girls
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And it was one of those summers. One of those summers that comes around every once in awhile with plenty of sun and heat and long days but somehow the nights felt even longer. And it was one of those summers about shared experiences. We all shared [...]
Three Poems
The Departure
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In winter, we pull on long underwear,
flesh colored and bulky under white socks
tucked snugly in around the ankles. Thermoses
full of hot water line up like nutcrackers
while ice bent the pipes overnight.
Grandmother searches for a picture
of grandfather, his forehead eaten by mildew.
I recount the seasons by the [...]
Mosquitoes
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I
We ride in the back of your parent’s car, watching the buildings get farther and farther apart. Our parents think we’re friends. I never said so, but I haven’t been your friend since sports camp last year. We had to hold each other’s hands in single file, [...]
Baltimore IKEA
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Both thirty-two but looking younger than our years,
we make a cute couple
as we wander artificial living rooms and kitchens,
poking fingers through denim belt loops,
testing out loveseats,
wondering if other shoppers invent stories about us.
Do they imagine we’re planning a wedding,
preparing to grow old
and share a life of ordinary [...]
Three Poems
I Touch Myself
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I touch myself
in the dark
as a plane hums above,
pregnant with death.
I touch myself
as starlight sparkles
on the surface
of falling bombs.
I reach down, searching
for warmth, something
to hold and believe in.
I reach down, searching
for music. I play this body
like a broken chord, my fingers
raw with tethered [...]
Two Poems
La Chupacabra Returns In Form Of Kitchen Appliance
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Gobbling bones beneath the sink.
Then you will be redeemer, you will be
the whirl of the garbage disposal.
Broken wineglass on the coffee table. You held it in your hands
and then it wasn’t. The dust of snapped tibias still lies in the [...]
Mount Bonnell
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My stepbrother, Will, is sitting in the chair that used to be my dad’s favorite before he left, and he’s smoking a joint and using a can of Diet Coke as an ashtray. He is talking about how the ego lives inside us all and creates pain, [...]
Wild Honey
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Where I live now the churches rival shopping malls in square-footage and parking. The pastor’s are all shellac and glean, with wives made-up as if ready for burial. They don’t speak much of hell or Satan anymore, not even the Baptists. There’s no money in it. I [...]
Up and Away
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The boy never made the cover of the black and white tabloids at the supermarket even though he learned to fly before he hit puberty. The curve in his back was subtle, but it was there and microfiche suggests he was born with a partial exoskeleton, what [...]
Three Poems
Where the Hero Contemplates Forgiveness
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Before you there was your father who carried a hammer
& fixed things. Each night like a dark broom swept him
into bed & he dreamed of you, a slowly focusing photograph
of messy hair settled atop a red tricycle,
two buck teeth in dinosaur pajamas you [...]
So Much Rain
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Butternut says if houses wore dresses, ours would have to lift up its skirt so rain wouldn’t soak into its ruffles. Cupcake says if our house’s joists were legs, the water would be past her knees. Puddleduck says by tomorrow the waves will splash up on our [...]
Two Poems
IF JANE HAD BEEN A RENEGADE
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Lizzy let’s run I know you’re
tired to tears of girdles for your hip-
flesh and mind-curves of buttoning
down your mouth to stanch the
bleeding out of rich verbal
life which you instead
replace with that
rosebud likeness all farce and
no face you’re getting to be so
yes [...]
Five Poems
MY THROAT IS FULL
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And there are days when I can’t even speak. You see my throat is a second heart. You see my throat is full of cotton balls. My bloody cotton balls on the bathroom floor. My dim heart as a mess of paint. My heart [...]
Five Poems
THE LAST ASTRAL ECHO
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Through the car roof comes the last astral echo of our love. We sit side by side, seatbelts still fastened, chins tilted up to the place where a minute ago there was no moon roof. The whole sky, made visible now through the roof’s [...]
Two Poems
Serial Killers’ Grocery Lists
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I.
Fred
Fred is currently in the cooling off period between his murders. Fred was a good student at Fairmount High School, in Wyoming, and was active in a local church, serving as Vice President of the Youth Fellowship. He believes he has cured himself of [...]
Wave and Particle
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Attending on the pier Vera feels swells coming to the pier coming in comes rolling forwarding moving on the inward motion as they come one then come the next and come and again. Vera can’t push back the coming tide water coming forward as she waits waiting [...]
How to Be a Better Girl
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If I get a pair of name-brand jeans my life in the seventh grade will really mean something. I won’t be just plain old Samantha Sievers with generic jeans and K-mart tennis shoes. And I don’t want no Hunt Club jeans, either. If my jeans are going [...]
The Paris Times
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My mother had sent me the newspaper clipping all the way from Paris, Texas, and I read it that very day. My picture was beside it, almost as big as life. It was my high school senior picture taken in May of ’62, just a few months [...]
What Gabby Likes
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Gabby likes celebrity gossip magazines and the faint gurgling noise that a person makes when they’re getting choked with a garrote wire. She isn’t sure if it is saliva or blood pooling in the back of the throat or the tongue wriggling frantically for one last breathe, [...]
The Sting
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It was only natural Gwen should feel nervous on the first day at her new job. A short, simple man in half sleeves led her around the office, pointing out all the wrong things while neglecting the important ones: “this is where we keep the office plant,†[...]
V
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This is not a secret. No man has ever touched me. No man will ever kiss me, want me, fuck me, feel me up. It’s not that I’m religious. It’s not that I’m romantic. It’s not that uncle touched me. It’s panic. It’s deep in my gut. [...]
Our Song
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Escucheme Baby, ’cause this is how it goes:
This is me.
A big-mouthed, little-bodied Latina with no tits, but that doesn’t stop me from buying the big-girl bras at Macy’s. You know, the ones with the lace and frills that itch, but look sexy during a strip [...]
Two Poems
Flood Loot
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I am oakbark tired and wiry from exertion
swimming pirogues in viscous water I have lost
shoes in every parish in Louisiana or stolen
them tied to a rod like a birth sac or host
of missing leather animals I carry them like lanterns
and they glow four months of munching [...]
The Woman Who Was a House
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There was a woman who was a house.
Not as big as. Was. A house. A vinyl-sided exterior coating her limbs, a sloped roof over her head. Her insides made of wood paneling, framed dusty pictures hanging on the wall of her chest cavity. Clinging to the back [...]
a third floor 11:47 story
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this is a third floor
eleven-forty-seven
story.
here,
secrets hide
in empty
mint tins
addled with dents
smelling of places
we shouldn’t have been.
we wear
sunglasses in the dark
we sing
when no one listens
we know
how to find treasures
at the bottom
of lost and found buckets
because it’s true
that the higher you
climb
the farther you fall.
and every shoe size
we outgrow
the world shrinks
just [...]
Christina Heppel
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One day Christina Heppel was sent home from school after turning up in knickers affixed with apple blossoms. Another day, she wore a top hat and crinoline, but wasn’t sent home. On a third occasion, she was paddled for sporting a horse-hair mustache. After that, she arrived [...]
Three Poems
The Worst Part
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isn’t the hard car hood,
the wrist burns
you wear home.
The worst part is the dream
that he comes in
while you’re watching TV
with your folks, tells them
I fucked her good.
When you can’t sleep
you creep downstairs,
a blank blue unfeeling
amid Oreos, chocolate
chip ice cream, last
slice [...]
Eleven Poems
Walgreens
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“I am hairless! Thank you drugstore!†She walks with a certain kind of pomp. “The yacht is calling,†she says. (Draped with silk and Swarovskis?) “The yacht is a stand-in,†she says. This is the beginning of a journey! (As usual, she wants to know how it [...]
Three On the Road
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Pull Over
I remember each exit we passed that sun-scorched afternoon. My hand on your thigh, your nails dug into my arm when I drove close to other cars. I pulled over, each hungry; the tree’s gracious shade; my reflection in your sunglasses, your screams and moans, [...]
Get Well Rose
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You talk to yourself a lot these days. Have you noticed that? The phone rings. It’s mom as usual. Same day, same time, every week. You haven’t picked up the phone in five months. Each time she calls, you send out a blank postcard. Always the same [...]
Two Poems
ELEGY FOR THE ANALOG SELF
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i had a system for drawing maps of rome:
all the roads led there & i roamed them
smearing concentric routes across
like the petals of an absurdly placed lotus
i would like to fold myself
in the dove wings of myself
in the dub gestures my double makes:
i [...]
Becoming Deer
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I want to explain.
No longer do I hunger for the familiar comforts: the meaty stews and steaks, the milk.
Like hiding a pill beneath the tongue, I retreat to the privacy of my bedroom and pour the warm milk into the narrow gap between the mattress and the [...]
Three Poems
Harlequin Does a Handstand
all phrases from Harlequin American Romance #795
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Cole, I am on fire.
Raquel nearly screamed in frustration,
dusted his chest and tapered downward.
The world: a sprinkle of dark hair
enough to carry the weight of
his virile body. His shoulders were broad.
Raquel drank in the sight of
a wind-swept [...]
Three Poems
If you don’t eat, how can you love?
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They had both lost
so much weight.
His melon shoulders
and rope swing neck
dwindled to boney outlines.
Her summer hips
whittled to the shape
of a wooden spoon.
By October, all that sex
had been skimmed away
like gravy going down a drain.
The day they butchered
the hens, the [...]
Piano Hands
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Smoking cigarettes draws attention to my crooked fingers. I’ve been so stupid. My mother says I used to have piano hands. My fingers were long and thin and delicate as the veins in a frog’s throat. The last time I saw my mother, she made fun of [...]
The Virtues of Being Mary
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charity in a pair of secondhand shoes
Mary Vo received a pair of maroon loafers for her tenth birthday. Each shoe had a slit on the patent leather, and each slit held a shiny penny. Mary’s mother made her don the shoes and [...]
Uses For a Uterus
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Let me tell you about the rat I keep in my uterus. He stores cotton balls, faux feathers, and little pink beads in me to make the perfect nest. I use these in my crafts. My uterus is squishy, and he has a fun time in there [...]
In the Duck Light
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My baby son got a rubber duck in his Christmas stocking. It lights up when you press the little metal sensors on its underside and the heat of the unventilated bathroom keeps it flashing all night. It leads me in to land when I have to piss [...]
Bábochka (Butterfly)
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Sometimes, at work, the fur was so soft beneath her fingers that Hannah felt she might be sick. The colours on the tips were not the same the whole way down – the surface might be dark grey, but part it, look along the shaft and the [...]
Hiccup
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I’m no expert, but to me, it looked human. This sea has brought me all sorts of things, over the years. Nothing like this.
No one’s permitted down in this cove, a rocky beach framed by walls built to hold the storms back. But I like coming here [...]
Job Opportunities Up North
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There was many a time, when I wanted to say,
that Hardrow Force looked like poured sugar or
how the Ure bleeds when cut by a sunrise.
But I didn’t. I kept shtum. Talked about,
grouting methods, how alternators
are always on the blink or the odds
of getting girls in the sack [...]
The Things We Lose in Tunnels
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It was worth getting out of bed today. The waistband of my skirt feels strange after weeks in pyjamas, but it’s good to see how life goes on. People get groceries, kids hang around bus stops. Walking down the street, trains rumble above and below me as [...]
HappyVegetarian.com
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Welcome to HappyVegetarian.com! You are viewing the most recent reviews for Kitty’s Kitchen, London Bridge (oldest to newest).
A FUN PLACE TO EAT
It was a little difficult to find Kitty’s Kitchen – it’s down a funny little backstreet, behind London Bridge railway station – but it was worth [...]
The gorse is out behind Glencanisp
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The hill is a blaze of rapefield yellow,
formica kitchen table yellow,
angry bawling teenage drumkit yellow
though honey biscuit sweet
with pale primroses at its feet
a demure cuckoo across the glen
and dandelions and tormentils below
all yellow, yellow, yellow.
Trash Ducks
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She took my empty water bottle and waggled hers.
“Do you want to feed the trash ducks?†she asked. I didn’t know what she meant, but I followed. Of course, I followed. When you meet a girl who is perfect, not real, there is nothing to do, but [...]
Two Stories
Your Big Dick Can’t Save You Now
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It’s entirely your fault. There’s no question in your cracked-out mind. The meth, the gay porn with underage European boys, the fact neither of you made it to the bedroom before ravishing one another. Your hopes of anal penetration, feeling [...]
Three Stories
House Fire
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Michael is four years old and his brother is seven years old and there is a fire. It’s summer. Michael is half the size of his brother. They are both only wearing underwear. Michael’s brother carries Michael out of the house and Michael puts his face [...]
Three Poems
PRIMARY VOTERS
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They were the boys who thought
Your older sister might make a good
Piece of ass. Two of them
Broke your cousin’s leg, on purpose,
To settle the matter of who told
On the shoplifters. These
Were the boys who had beer
And sex three years before you:
You were inept with [...]
Summer Sunday at the Fair: a Rebuttal to Water for Elephants
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Here’s the elephant, scooping her trunk across the earth. Here’s the girl, in a dress, scooping peanut shells from around the elephant’s feet. Here’s the banker, fucking the girl from behind. Here’s the banker’s wife, tapping her Coach heels in the dirt, moving her sunglasses onto her [...]
Baboon
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They said he was a baboon. They said he was ugly and hairy and that he smelled, but I was drawn to him immediately. I will admit that I’d always had a thing for him: I had noticed him before, in the past, when he used to [...]
Power Outage: 3 p.m., College of Engineering
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The rooms now closets, black as the handles
of spades pushing their rude darkness into every
conversation. Engineers make widgets
that alert oncoming deer to cars or oncoming
cars to deer: either way, the one gracefully steers
out of the path of the other. Engineers know
why lights go on and off, [...]
Two Poems
Vanishing Points
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Because the absence of prettiness can lead to invisibility,
she bit a clean circle in the flesh around her wrists,
ringed in red wells, used her teeth for the degloving
veins and sinews tucked neatly under bone
in love with her own blood.
Because the molar necklace sweltered at her throat,
she [...]
Skin
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My son leaves flakes of his skin around the house in piles, mica-like mounds deposited on the arm of the sofa, the corner of the kitchen table, the rim of the bathroom sink, the top drawer of the nightstand. Filial detritus.
We sleep in the same bed still. [...]
Guerilla Drive-In
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It all starts at the drive-in.
He sucks her toes.
The night’s hot and dark. She’s thankful he can’t see her face. They keep the windows rolled up and the radio going. Some Willie Nelson song is on, about a girl with blue eyes. Beads of sweat trail from [...]
Portrait of a Dead Mother
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I thought I saw my mother
laying in the road with those death
chalk lines around her.
Some kids were kicking a ball
around her.
I heard a teenager laugh
around her.
I thought about shouting in his face
but I had to see her face,
look into her eyes
see the reflection of who
did this to [...]
Burglary
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Carol decided to burglarize her neighbor’s house. She was a friend of the family, but there were things she wanted that the family had. She was tired of seeing the things, leaving them for the family. She wore a ski mask and used a flashlight. She went [...]
Two Poems
Diagram of the Carnal Male
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Top
It’s not enough to want him open
you have to pry, wrench, lie, spit, sidle
your tongue-noise along his hear-holes, beg
like wolf to pig: I will fry you in your own grease.
It’s just enough to want him open, the rest is in
the finger-mouth-epithet triumvirate, spitting
coarse [...]
Fakiness
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You watch fake news. You say it’s because you hate the real news. And you claim the real news is faker than the fake news, the fake news being the only news that tells the truth.
You ask “But what is The Truth?” waiting for the other person [...]
Communion
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I smiled nervously and thought, This is strange and funny but sort of sexy… I thought of my new lover and how this could make a great kinky scene. I knew he was waiting. I never did well with silences. I heard the priest place his palm [...]
May Day
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I chipped my bottom front tooth wrestling with Codrut in his fancy flat in the center of the city. Codrut was the son of a secret police officer who was not so secret and who was not an officer (he was an interrogator; a genius at pulling [...]
Letters From.
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Letter #1
I’m sorry that I could not tell you,
that I never learned to speak,
that my silence makes you shift your weight as though turning or bracing for a blow and
that you say it makes you uncomfortable,
that you made his hands arch as though from aching or in [...]
Excerpt from “In One Storyâ€
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In one story, the two sisters met in high school. One was a senior, the other a freshman. For whatever reason, they were drawn to one another. The senior was excited each day to see the freshman pass by her. The freshman was a little less sure [...]
Underskirts
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Girl #1
She found me with my hands around chickens, fingers stretched wide, thumbs over beaks. My skirt, mud-weighed, tugged at my ankles as I dipped low. Silly to curtsey while armed with birds, I knew, but it had to be done. If I’d let go they’d’ve flown [...]
Clock Time (The Shape of Time Keeping)
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To best preserve this piece’s original formatting, it is being made available as a PDF for your reading enjoyment.
New Math
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I Wear a Leather Jacket in My Head
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I wear a leather jacket in my head. I ride a motorcycle in my head. I snort powders and don’t take showers in my head. Sometimes I sing for an imaginary punk band. Scream through a microphone and vomit onstage. Rip off my clothes and cut my [...]
Two Poems
Mrs. Speaks
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She stands before a window speaking
with a friend, she shifts like compost collapsing
beneath a dress in summer heat. On her nose
a wreck of warts that glisten in light like elvers.
She’s remembering out loud: “When the workers
marched Badger came home to find Henry
had my skirt up past [...]
Porch
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Over the phone, a woman I used to see tells me about her nightmares. What do you know about dreaming, I think.
“I couldn’t even begin to tell you,†she says. From the bathroom, the washing machine clicks off.
“Go ahead,†I say. “Try.â€
“Well,†she says, “one time I [...]
Len and Ernie
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My brother don’t know it, but he ain’t long for this world. I’ve been carryin’ him around our whole life, and he ain’t never once carried me. I’ve been eatin’ and drinkin’ and sittin’ and standin’ and walkin’ and talkin’ for him since we was born and [...]
What We Had To Do
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The fragments pulled smoke streamers down the sky, lit in our grass, caught in our tree limbs–smoldering ornaments, ashes, white light. We rushed out with blankets and fire extinguishers.
Enough was enough.
We met in the church basement. We didn’t argue this time. In low voices, with grim faces, we planned. [...]
Man from the Attic
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Yesterday afternoon I was lying on my bed flipping through a magazine when a man emerged from the attic. The attic door is next to my bedroom so I’d heard him coming down the stairs, but he was so quick about it that I didn’t have time [...]
Contemptibly, A Hair
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Contemptibly, a hair – a hair not sprouted from Stan Manley’s own largish pores-floats there, follicle and all, atop the khaki-colored surface of his steaming cup of generic white-label coffee, flavored artificially with the powdered variety of non-dairy-hazelnut creamer, the kind that tends to clump [...]
Travelers
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The passenger beside him squirmed and fidgeted with the window crank. The passenger kicked his short legs. He cranked the window handle clockwise until it snapped then counterclockwise until it snicked. The pane stammered higher then lower then back again as though it caught within the chassis. [...]
Everett Pike, Nearly
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Andrew growled from the landing halfway up the stairs as the two men, inspectors wearing loose suits the color of ash, made for the door. Once they were gone the dog moved in a flurry, climbing his front paws onto the old piano bench and watching through [...]
Shells
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Karen used Coquina for the wings. It was an easy decision. She needed an easy decision. She took a breath before placing the glue. Another day she might have tried Spirulas or Jingles. But not today. Today she chose Coquinas, shells that look like wings even in [...]
Five Poems
First Year of Marriage
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Love is the burning point. – Joseph Campbell
You get up from the couch to rekindle
the fire. I ask if you need a match as you
twist the newspaper into a horseshoe
and stick it between dim embers and logs.
You say no, the fire will catch.
Everyone says [...]
Today
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Two squirrels obscenely rub their rumps together in some kind of warm-up for a long afternoon of frolicking. The council of crows carries on and deems the future from the fallen sticks caught in the storm drain grate. The conclusions they draw are the same ones the [...]
Buenos Aires in Three Short Lessons
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I. El Beso. Riobamba 416, Abasto.
Sebastián spoke in castellano but when my foot fumbled he repeated in English, “¡No, no!, you must step on the beat.” I explained it wasn’t a language barrier but incoordination at the cellular level. I hoped he wouldn’t notice cracked calluses slipping [...]
No Witnesses
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Mrs. Loveall is a hypochondriac who keeps her medicine cupboard completely stocked for every pain killing need-Percocet, Vicodan, Oxycontin, Flexeril, Dilaudid. After about five minutes of being let inside, Mrs. Loveall reveals the contents of her medicine cupboard to Marcus along with her current degree of bloating, [...]
Four Poems
What I Mean When I Ask You to Zip Up My Dress
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Every night I try shaking it out-the hole in my back,
between my shoulder blades and slightly northwest.
I loosen all the junk from an upended purse, weeding
through spent tissues; lipstick; a throat lozenge; toy truck;
book of [...]
Four Poems
(letter to her, without her, in red)
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Today was an O so lovely today!
Each flower I passed smiled at me
with its bright bright head & I
was breathing in the blue air. I said
hello to every orange & yellow scribble
drawn out from the big round sun
& the gray, [...]
Noct
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I was com
You said you would wai
Twelve hundred miles in a day -
I counted houses, then their ligh
Came home to an empt
Not even my shir
my green shir
Are you wearing it now?
It’s hot, the house is hot; the walls,
even the handle on the refr
What the f
What can anyone [...]
Parallax
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The Russians Have Come
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The Muscovites play chess at Denny’s until 1 am. The Siberians wait for the bus in the snow without jackets. The Georgians – they aren’t really Russian. They never were. They like to remind people of that. Years ago, Russia let out a bunch of Jews. All [...]
Notes on the Notebook of a Five-Year Old Neurotic
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Once Upon a Time There Was a Pirate Ship And it Sank
When I was five years old, I unknowingly channeled the voice of Ernest Hemingway. Those were my words, scribbled on the first page of a marble notebook-actually, the only thing written in that particular notebook-in handwriting [...]
The Spectrum
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The home above us is made of red crystal. Its inhabitants are illuminated so brilliantly they become red platelets moving about in red veins. A new form of space is created: there are the crystal walls, the emptiness in between them that makes a home, and then [...]
Sustenance
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“If we get really lost in here,” Aphra says, “I might kill and eat you.”
“If we get really lost in here,” says Seth, “I’ll cut off your arm and we can roast it over a spit.”
Aphra and Seth are driving through the Angeles National Forest and the [...]
A Famine of Music
The Inventor of Ears
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From the door of the inventor’s apartment, a man with small satellites bolted to the sides of his head ran out into the night. His head low, he stumbled under streetlights and went downtown, homing in on the grind of traffic and noise of [...]
Two Poems
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Your Pain is 11 Things (And I Hope I’m Never One of Them)
1.
your pain is a limousine
a beautiful vehicle by which to carry
the less fortunate
2.
your pain is a vegetable cart
in a supermarket world
when you bring your lover an apple
it is by the sweat of your back
and every [...]
Men With Own Tuxedos
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I went on Craigslist and I wrote the ad: Wanted: men with own tuxedos to be extras in independent film. I added, tuxedo must be clean.
Responses filled my inbox. Men who owned tuxedos needed work badly. I conferred with our director, a brilliant but impatient man. [...]
Noah Falck
CINCINNATI
for Mike Ostendorf
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Drink a bottle of Tequila in the dining room. Expand internally. She’ll leave lipstick on the earthy portion of your cheek; lick your nostrils in multiples of four. Allow the wetness to harden. Then undress her slowly in a room fumbling with [...]
Annam Manthiram
Superheroes
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Superheroes are not Indian. They don’t drown in seven yards of fabric or keep their privates cool with man skirts. Their muscles are predestined, like neglect in a nursing home, so they don’t go to the gym. They don’t have to distress over MRSA, [...]
Lacey Martinez
Birth Defect
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My baby is born with six fingers on each hand. They’re just little nubs of skin next to the pinkies, but no hay duda they’re fingers. The doctor says the birth defect is very common, and besides the extra fingers, Ernesto is totally normal. I’m not [...]
Hannah Miet
In our wedding vows, I’d beg
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that you withhold your scorn
when I throw up the contents
of our dinner on the rug
and close my eyes, to hide
from your reaction.
I’d ask for the volume
switch on the world,
and you’d hum
in my ear
when it got too quiet.
We’d vibrate.
I’d read The New Yorker [...]
Sherry O’Keefe
This Was Supposed to Be About Karl, But It Didn’t End Up That Way
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His name was Pompey but he was not the original one.
This one was tender about old swords but serious
when it came to storing the same sixpence
in his pocket from the trousers he wore before.
If [...]
Merritt Tierce
I’m Too Short to Ride This Ride
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K stands for Kavanagh and Kay, which are the respective first and last names of my only remaining offline friend or acquaintance. Even my grandmother, who gave birth to two children before the transistor was invented, has an AOL account. My [...]
Mel Bosworth
Jonah Is Clean
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Jonah digs holes and buries things. Jonah digs holes and buries things. Jonah digs holes and buries things.
I ask Jonah, “What’s with all the holes and burying things?”
Jonah digs a hole and buries me.
I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.
I [...]
Christy Crutchfield
Little Thing
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Little Thing wants to know, “When is it our firework,” and Linda says, “Patience.”
Little Thing is planted hard on my lap and her bathing suit will leave wet butt prints on my dress. I kept her busy for two hours, while they planned their poor failed [...]
Jess Glass
The Baby in the Bedroom
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The baby in the bedroom has veins as thin and fine as strands of hair leading to her heart, each muffled heartbeat a whisper, her blood pressure no more forceful than the drip from a leaky faucet.
The mother and father are out. [...]
Joshua McKinney
Near Song
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“The music is good and, each his own, all will make my song more pleasant.”
—Jaufra Rudel
I
Matinal
Imagine there is nothing
to be made up
for in the morning
“Some birds are poets”
good mentors singing
the imagination lonely
mindful freedom enduring
garden trouvaille o see
this my green author
how rapidly new
flowers [...]
Marcus Wicker
Oblivious Spring
Detroit, Michigan
Obtuse red bolts cranked at each corner of the lot. Shirtless kids slapping hydrant-spray at largemouth bass-grins. Thin strands of water nearly blind Eastern Market cement. My wife Joy and I, we’re in the thick of it, managing to overstep their runoff. Gum-popping teen lovers and elderly couples [...]
Christopher Phelps
An Ouroboros
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Together, n queer men can form an ouroboros.
Cases
n>2:
More common in cities. A segmented circle of feedback: a circuit so excited it shorts, but no one is
shorted. Everyone desires the milk of his fellow man, and everyone shares his own. A model of
queer utopia not yet established.
n=2:
Also [...]
Sofia Rhei transl. by Lawrence Schimel
Cenicienta
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La puerta del aseo está llena de inscripciones amorosas. Si no me
hubiera entretenido leyéndolas, no habrÃa oÃdo cómo alguien entraba en
el cubÃculo contiguo y se masturbaba lentamente, susurrando, entre
jadeos, un nombre muy poco frecuente: el mÃo.
Tan sólo pude ver sus extraños zapatos, ya que se fue [...]
Maureen Seaton
When I Was Bi(nary)
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I contrasted nicely with unary,
ternary, quarternary, and so on.
In this way, I functioned hypothetically
and trouble-free as a pair of bosons,
which, we know, will happily occupy
one quantum state, unlike two fermions.
Explosive, I fissioned and coded. My
planetary bodies orbited themselves
like a bi-asteroid, a bi-star (blue/white),
bi-nomials, [...]
Kevin Simmonds
Barnes and Noble
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Widening my aperture for Ai
(It’s what you want. If you didn’t/you wouldn’t
beg to be poured into my mouth)
I’m distracted by a young Asian squatting
in front of the philosophy section
Even if I get
that cabin by the creek patient dog at my feet
while I write my [...]
Robert Alan Wendeborn
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Use Your Lips And Teeth
This didn’t start with casual sex
it was just a moment in a long string of moments that will end in our death
I gave you my scarf because I wanted it back
Worrying is the last thing on my mind because you’ll be on your [...]
Jenny Bitner
Is This Part of the Love Ritual?
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It is late at night and I am lying in my bed willing the aliens to come to me, throwing my voice out into the night like a lifeline, looking for a catch. My pillow smells like musty baby powder. I [...]
J. Bradley
For Those Who Are About To Die, We Salute You: A Cautionary Tale
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Chapter 1—Life on Mars
Aulus Minucius Plautus stretches the slaughterhouse of his body in his bedchamber. He looks at his shield, craning his neck to catch the reflection of the notches. Aulus counts each [...]
DeWitt Brinson
The Cow
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Demiurgic living space, cows are rooms who roam. Sometimes found in the closet, sometimes found in the den, once in the kitchen, twice in the bed. Sacred objects imperturbable, wonderful as houseboats. One never knows when one will open a room only to stumble into a [...]
Phil Estes
Josephine is alone, not lonely
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The cowboy had broad shoulders
Like Jeremiah Johnson
And red hair like brushfires.
His nose broke like the Flint Hills.
The traces of barbwire
In his palms—dead trees
At the edge of a lake.
The cowboy said:
“I slit the throat of a calf
Caught in the fence.
You look like [...]
Burnt Filament
UNDER THE BUZZ OF FLUORESCENCE AT THE VERMILLION SERVICE PLAZA
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A bowlegged guy with bloodshot eyes stands two urinals
away in scuffed Frye boots, a black ball cap, a cell phone
tucked between his shoulder and cheek.
It’s 8 a.m. He smells of sweat and whiskey.
So, I’m eating my fries when [...]
Jeffrey Pethybridge
Two Consecutive Pages In A Notebook
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3:00 AM.
After daylong labor.
For restoration of his powers and to process the day’s complexities.
The Sleeper elaborates.
His breath’s rhythm, the breathing of those sleeping next to him.
The memories swimming through their separate persons.
The house’s dark and temperature.
Into the stuff of dreams.
‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”
Most of [...]
Isabell Serafin
What I Have Been Doing Since I Was Last with You
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I have been married. I have been divorced. I have been pregnant, since I was last with you.
I have sat on the banks of Hoan Kiem Lake in the afternoon–the lake in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, whose waters [...]
Nicelle Davis
Crossfire Chemistry of Nightmares and Telephone Calls
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Pituitary gland: well the size of a pea at the base of the brain—
floods my whole self in the wet rush of feeling. Rivers of fire
across channels of thought begin to form an image. The sun
is falling in orbs the [...]
John Fischer
An Elegy For Dust and Flight
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The Astronaut wakes up on the floor again. Today he is in the basement, a cinder-block storage space with a water heater in one corner. He has slept heavily on his side, as though he were still in bed. The combination of [...]
Matt Lapata
Absalomammon
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Absalom sits on the white floor and looks at a bubbling puddle of bronze in the middle of the room. The walls, like the floor, are harsh and white and lined with grey rivets. The room is small. The wall opposite Absalom has a door [...]
Matt Salesses
Writing about Our Island of Epidemics
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1. Our island had epidemics, which came and went, but the epidemics were not exactly illnesses. They were epidemics of unrequited love, or memory loss, or obsessing, or unstoppably growing hearts, or farts. Our island had always had epidemics, as far as [...]
Bonnie ZoBell
You Talking to Me?
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Ed wheels his cab around the block and takes a second look. He stubs his weed in the ashtray, sticks a meager plastic bag into the dashboard opening before sliding the radio back in. The girl still stands there, can’t be fifteen.
“Hey, mister!” she [...]
Jen Gann
Tiger Town
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We stood whistling on the town beach. A few miles down, a dead tiger washed up on the sand. The crowd gathered around the tiger had swollen to the dunes by the time we arrived.
“How on Earth?” people asked over and over.
People snapped pictures [...]
Robert Swartwood
The Chameleon Kid
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The chameleon kid is standing beside a tree. Nobody can see the chameleon kid because, in a sense, he has become that tree. The grainy bark, the knots, even the dull green leaves—the chameleon kid is able to morph all of those aspects into himself.
Two [...]
Bill Yarrow
GETTING GODLESS
I.
God is man squared. That is to say, God is man raised to a higher power.
Man is the root, the square root, of God.
We believe in the ideal (truth, wisdom, justice, honor, integrity, selflessness, sacrifice, compassion, goodness) and God is the name we give to that ideal.
What else is [...]
James Tadd Adcox
DISEASES, DISORDERS, BREAKS
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There are of course, girls and girls; yet at heart they are pretty much alike. For man, the over-grown boy, life has commonly two, and only two, sides: work, and play. When the father of a boy wishes to arrange a marriage [...]
Kaitlin Dyer
As Lovers Do
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We traded aortas
under the Ballerina Magnolia that had already bloomed
and wilted
and dropped its petals to our feet. You called
for 5-0 surgical silk
to stitch
the artery in its place: Don’t forget the gauze.
Don’t leave the gauze in my chest.
R.D. Parker
Stillness
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From the defoliated fixed point
in the ex-forest, Mr. Zero
stares into the vanishing point.
At the vanishing point, no one
stares back at portly Mr. Zero.
There is no shot / reverse shot
except as you pan across the scene
in these restless words.
In these restless words,
Madame Seventy-Three calls
for an end to abstractions.
Madame [...]
David Frederick Thomas
“Hanging Is The New Hugging: A Six Cassette Path To Becoming A True Modern Father With Dr. Daniel H. Nelson, Ph.D.”
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Charlie had a wart on the bottom of his foot, brown and textured like dirt stuck to sap. In the first couple of years, as their [...]
Ocean Vuong
Revelation
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Because we were boys,
I could only touch you in the dark.
Where we pretended the sins
promised by our fathers
could not find us.
In the path of trembling hands,
the hair on our thighs rose
against the night, and I dreamed
the extraordinary things
light would do to the parts I touched:
tuft of hair, [...]
Seth Fischer
Dead Cows
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Mr. Supervisor, I can tell by the way you’re looking at me that you think I’m batshit. You think I’m one step away from screaming about Jesus’ tonsils and pissing on tourists on Powell Street while they’re waiting for the cable car. You don’t understand how [...]
Kathleen Heil
Tomato
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I taught the children I teach English I say tomato is code
for quiet is supposed to get a finger you say mouth.
In the newspaper an article about the eye of a tomato
Her heart was struck she didn’t sing, she cried
the gloves are off her hands are in [...]
Julie Babcock
Grandmother Advises the Dodo
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Next time you fall off a cliff
wind the gramophone.
Light a cigarette
and recite “The Harp-Weaver.”
Drink coffee black as night
on the settling davenport.
Brace yourself for better bones.
Grandmother Invites Me In
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You hungry? I’ll fix you
an egg. Two
or three. Come
into the kitchen. [...]
Nik De Dominic
On Balloon Boy
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There is a pretty distance between you and I:
I want to say it looked like a star fish, no,
jelly fish, it’s undulation in the sky, the sky
a refraction of the ocean, the terrible terrain.
But I will not say that, I know it’s tired.
I will name [...]
Andrea Kneeland
But I Will Make Your Sandwiches Just The Way You Like Them, With Too Much Mayonnaise And No Mustard, And I Will Make Sure Not To Use My Hands Too Much When I’m Giving You A Blowjob, Since You Told Me That’s How You Like Me To Do It, And [...]
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdao
The Martian Martian Poet and Green Groupie
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Someone had untied the five segments of the stuffed goldfish, so the five pieces lay about the African blackwood table like assorted shapes shining in velvet and satin. It had eyes made of corduroy, a pink tulle section, a hairy belly [...]
Michelle Menting
On the first day of class, we wrestle heuristics
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What was your first nickname?
Did it include your first pet (Mittens)
and the road (Shady Lane) you lived on
when you were ten? (Did children make fun
of your stutter or lisp? Did they call you
Mitten-Spittens, Thady Thlane, Shady
Spit-Shit?) What are [...]
Chris Tarry
Hole
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It took the entire world to fix the hole in the System. Chinese Control Officers, Eskimo Energy Anthropologists, US Department of Technology Practitioners, Canadian Space Enthusiasts, and Croatian Computer Component Manufacturers—anyone and everyone. The hole was three thousand miles long, five miles high, and had required the [...]
Brian Allen Carr
Falcon Jackson
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Falcon, your world would be different if Michael still lived. He would have followed your story from the beginning. He would have watched from his helicopter as the balloon floated on. He would have known the truth, because he would have sensed it, and he would [...]
Jeffrey Hermann
The Yielding and the Unyielding
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Not yet fall, orchard vines outweigh their fruit.
Some of these nights my son and I sleep
together, his small body and the September nights
too warm. All night long our arms and legs
spell out messages beneath the sheets—
the wrong language for each of [...]
Diane Lockward
My Dark Lord
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Cover me in filth, for I have lain down with pigs.
Toss me like a salad in silt and grime.
Dig a ditch and bury me up to my neck.
Pelt me with mud pies dark as fudge.
Withhold water, soap, exfoliant, and loofah.
Cleanse not my polluted flesh.
Anoint me [...]
Jennifer Pashley
Magic
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Because your husband is far away. He is in another country, and you don’t even want him to be your husband anymore, but you can’t say that because he’s a soldier. To say that is un-American. And this is why you stay with your parents now, in [...]
Ori Fienberg
Glass Boat
for the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA
The artists of the city decided to build a glass boat. It had a glass keel, and a glass mast with glass sails. But what could they do with a glass boat? Out on the ocean it made [...]
Amber Sparks
Storage Space
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The homeless woman was huge, loud, foul-mouthed. She cursed at the doctor as he pushed and prodded at her, called him a goddamn-no-good-son-of-a-bitch for invading all her spaces.
The doctor was toned and tan and to him, the woman was a house. He flung open doors, pulled [...]
Maureen Alsop
Hippomancy
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divination by means of observing the movements and sounds of horses
Nothing describes the verdant science of your ribs. Yesterday, the shaman spat in small orbits before you, examining traces of buttercup, courtyard sun splashes, roadside places confessed onto gravel. You have learned to die without confusion. [...]
Tracy Bowling
Pink
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Today I have taught Yeti “walls.” He has built two woody sides that come only up to our knees. Yeti crafts them with care; he has felled ten trees. There are not many left in the valley.
The Yeti labors. He stacks the trees with snow, wraps them [...]
J. Bradley
Seaside
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The condom looks like
what a sea serpent miscarries
in the gymnasium’s bathroom
during Junior Prom.
After naming it Carl,
I use the toilet brush
like a priest to give him
last rites.
I put the casket lid
of the seat down,
watch until the burial
gargles, rinses.
True Story
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The biker’s forehead acted
like a mother hen [...]
Neil de la Flor
Ars Magna for Manifold Dimensions of z
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‘â€Ã†’ (z) = 1/2
If a boy is no longer z, or is negative z, then what is he?
To heck with z and your negativity but if you really want to know, beg.
I am, you see? I’m on my knees.
Well, [...]
Jac Jemc
The Things Which Blind Us
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I hated when they made me wear the bear suit in public and hated it more for how comfortable it was when I was alone: a conundrum. The heat had been turned off in my apartment for almost a week. Wearing the bear [...]
Melanie Browne
Half price mojitos
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While reading poems
by Raymond Carver
and trying to avoid the sun,
the mind might wander a bit,
but only to recall seeing
a sign just off the
highway,
for half price
mojitos,
or to move
one hand to
slap a mosquito,
THWAP!
and wipe
away the blood
Timothy Leary’s Progress
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I’ve been waiting to dream about
Timothy Leary [...]
Katie Manning
Love Song for Grapefruit
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I’ve conquered the punishment of soap
in my mouth, sweet followed by bitter,
puckering. Grapefruit soap makes
me want to eat the fruit. So I do.
In my mouth, sweet followed by bitter,
the sliced open sun startles
me. I want to eat the fruit. So I do
stick my fingers [...]
Nicelle Davis
Judas and Jesus as Boys
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Judas, bury me in the sand.
I don’t wanna.
Come on. I’ll let you use my glass shovel.
Leave me alone [...]
Peter Levine
There Are Two Girls Next To Me Knitting
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There are two girls next to me knitting. We are at a coffee shop/restaurant/bar. One has a dark blue ball of yarn in front of her. The other has a ball of burgundy yarn from which she’s [...]
Steven J. McDermott
Sliver
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Coming out of the tall grass onto the sand at the top of the beach, she paused. Saw him before he saw her. Not too late to take control, she told herself. Not too late to let the frontal lobes have their victory over that limbic stem [...]
Lylanne Musselman
The Day Truman Capote Died
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The day Truman Capote died
my heart reeled from the headlines
that rivaled a non-fiction novel.
The story was: my friend
entered Head’s Tavern
to purchase a 6-pack to go
when the six foot seven ex-policeman slid his hand
between her legs to cop a feel,
hoping to poke a new [...]
Jared Walls
Ginger Ale
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The first newspaper
I ever read informed me
that I may or may not get cancer
from drinking ginger ale.
This frightens me from
a delicious drink most of my life,
before I realize I’d have to drink enough
ginger ale to drown a planet
of white laboratory mice
in order to die, to watch [...]
Lesa Alison-Hastings
Plotting Escape
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1.
He put her on a shelf with other jars.
At first glance her jar looks empty.
She had no intention of getting caught.
Thought she was invisible
against the overcast day,
debris filming her eyes
[...]
Caroline Klocksiem
Plow and reaper
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And when I slide back in, your arms wind over me,
thin shadows tendril into sleep.
Your legs the stick limbs of crickets perched in the white field
or long as the deep rooted Oak we left behind.
Your hips doubling, flutter. The nerves when we first
moved, first gave [...]
Sharon McGill
Prick
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She says it like that. She says: “I know you’re the prick.”
It’s Tuesday, 6 am. Dawn blushes the east as I stand amid a line of commuters awaiting the 6:10 to Emeryville. The sleepy dozen of us are heading west into the dark, over and past the [...]
Ethel Rohan
Babies On The Shore
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Just as I reached the beach, it rained. The naked raindrops fell on my face, making me blink, and stuck to my lips, turning to syrup in my gloss. Mother’s ghost warned me to go back, that I’d catch my death, like death was [...]
Anne Valente
Nines
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The ingredients emulsified — olive oil, balsamic, a pinch each of salt, pepper and sugar — and Jenna poured them over the lettuce she’d torn, adding a few sprigs of rosemary on top. She set the mixing cup in the sink and watched it flood with [...]
Summer Block
Sonnet for the Mother Mary
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I remember the low moan of cattle,
Their feet stirring the hay to musty gold,
And the sound of a rolling boulder
Like distant nursery thunder.
As a child I heard sobbing in the tents:
Our bodies took the vow of coming pain.
In Bethlehem, my womb was forever
Praying, [...]
Katherine Grosjean
Them Bones
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I’m telling you, he knew. From the moment he first saw me Marty knew I was crazy for it, and then used it to get me to go out with him. Doris, he said, let’s you and I play mah jongg. Teach me, he said. I [...]
Tim Jones-Yelvington
Fugitives
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Most nights, Calvin and I lie in bed and watch TV. Calvin’s stomach is a pillow, but I don’t mind. Calvin flips the channels. With each channel flipped, sound explodes. “Will you stop?” I say. “You’re making me epileptic.” Calvin grabs my cock and says, “Do I [...]
Sarah Layden
The Rest of Your Life
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In an hour, you’re scheduled to learn about the rest of your life.
It’s all mapped out: a twenty-minute drive north through the winter sleet. A left turn at the looming hospital building. Before entering, you refresh your lipstick in the parking lot. This [...]
Cortney McLellan
Sweet, Juicy Pepper
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She slices into a pepper, dull knife popping through thick, red skin.
One baby tugs her nightgown, smearing applesauce. Another crashes a talking racecar into her shoe. Remove batteries. Remove applesauce. Remove tethers.
The skin separates, sprays pepper-mist over her hands and chin. She inserts a finger [...]
Laura Marello
In One Enormous Bed Like Children
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After he made love to his wife, Pearse lay on his back and waited until he could hear her steady breathing. When he was sure she was asleep he checked the time. The illuminated numbers on the digital clock glowed [...]
Laurie Junkins
Cloistered
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These once shallow furrows now fold
into fans across my brow, the spoils
of my lamentations clinging like rust
on blunt tools. I kiss your baby lips,
flaunt you, my starry opal,
as if I were a woman gutted
by a womb in stasis, biology foiled.
These languid days of ours,
playing, eating, drawing [...]
Jan LaPerle
Popovers
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Eleanor was very heavy, but beautiful, rosy, sweet, and rolling with babies. She kept her triplet boys in the folds of her skin, all three at once, Edward, Dickey, and Tim, a little like kangaroos carry their young. She had a passion for popovers, and [...]
Tamiko Beyer
Jangle & Sweat, Twenty-O-Eight
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a credo
not sick but stink
not stink but silver
not silver but slate
not slate but grate
not grate but gate
not gate but wait
not wait but water
not water but will
not will but pill
not pill but power
not [...]
Melanie Browne
I blame the sun for my bad posture
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I.
I want to walk
Like Jimmy Stewart
in “Mr. Hobbs takes a vacation”
while birdwatching,
he’s bending his knees
lower than Limbo
leaving arms free to point a
finger revolver At the sun
II.
It might slow an avalanche
of societal changes
which leave me catatonic,
lying in great piles of leaves,
pretending [...]
George Moore
A Few Words
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He decides one day to write something new, something perhaps just slightly unintelligible. The contemporary equivalent of a personal sign, or a rune. He maps out his possibilities, chooses the upper right-hand corner where the space of the page makes its intrusion into [...]
Rich Murphy
Now Clones
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Suckers for the fantasy bribe
come into the world each moment
and never wean themselves
from their accomplishing
as accomplices their victimhood.
The mug and half-Nelson
flip sides of police records platinum.
Parking lots slurp air
from mall stores that wait
for emergency transfusions
from trailer trucks. The point
above a prime scene flashes
naked body parts, its [...]
Jonathan Sapers
No More White Boys
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Sempe has a small blue star on her right cheek that everyone thinks is a tattoo. It’s not, it’s what, when she looks in the mirror, makes her think most of her father whose skin is blue black and the difference between his skin [...]
Austin Tremblay
Taking a Mold
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There were never so many cigarettes smoked than the day they shut our building down for mold. We walked outside and lit up, said, Fuck mold anyway. We’ll smoke and die quicker than mold could kill us.
After we burned them, it felt like [...]
Lauren Wheeler
Sleep Corrupts Her
.
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During the night, the mascara
she was too tired to remove
migrated to her cheeks in an onyx smear,
crusted in the corners of her eyes.
Her skin gleams feverish and tight,
etched with lines the pillow made,
like sand after high tide.
Once ruby lips now resemble
bruised plums and, parted
slightly as [...]
Mel Bosworth
Xyrophobic Me
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My beard is a haven for battered children.
They hide in the hairs when things get scary.
My beard once lectured on the dangers of drugs.
It wore a checkered tie and pounded the podium with knotty fists.
The audience sat up in their chairs.
Men fidgeted.
Women sighed.
In the summer, beads [...]
Matthew James Babcock
The Transient Rains of April Thirteenth
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If nothing else, I have this: I once saved a girl’s life. Five years back, before our son was
born, I was walking a street that had grown as familiar as your pulse. January. Twenty below. Chestnut trees, stripped [...]