National Pen Pal Day June 1, 2018 Think back to when you were a kid and you’d give the classroom globe a spin, stop it with your fingertip, and vow to move to whatever loca- tion you landed on. Recall how sometimes you’d hit the ocean and have to spin again. Recall that sometimes you’d …
Visitors may not noticethat the windows in her room are sealed shutso the air is spent, used up days ago, and they’re not there later to hear the coursing of an underground river through her pillowthat stops as she rolls over.She must have been asleep when the flowers arrived. A shock of redin a disinfected …
No one can hide a body here.A hawk’s insistence. Someone. Thresh it. Get rid of these thoughts about the body.An orange sky unfolds a wheat field in the middle of nowhere. I’m a hide-and-seek girl without service.A person is a series of happenings.Seek and what I find is a guy stops his car behind mine, …
At the Standard they pay a man to lathe olive woodinto the softball-sized spheres they load the braziers within the heat of early afternoon. They douse them with gas, touch a match: and the guests with their crow facesand sky-colored suits emergeto sip from tiny eggshell glasses.Orchids lean out from jute baskets lashedto the palm …
I ShowingsYears circled like ravensin carrion rapture. Plague’s fleecing accomplice, snow fell to chill the children.Steep iced hills. Sullen dayless dales.Splintered bellsfor burials ringing. All the endings I endured, and still I carried on.A widow of winter’s toll, I’d been shown woe.Beyond these walls: broken eggshells, factions sparring, endlessfenced-in fields. Cemeteries breathless.Ice erasing small graves.But …
Half the pleasure of disguise is finding oneself recognized, known not only for the shape assumed to suit a particular masquerade but alsofor the untold fittings, auditions, rehearsals, and touch-ups the latest ensemble betrays.In his harlequin hostess he glimpses the girlwho prowled the wings of the Jellicle Ball, who scarred a Phantom, tusked a Beast, …
Across the street, Trail Manor flows in purple italics on a camper besidea seasonally perky house. This is heaven. Pajamas at the bus stop, yoga on a strict schedule, a covert but growing gratitude for sloth. Who’s walking with me?Children I love. Yet I long to be a bare blue between clouds, not looking down,not …
The gods of summer grow fat in their swelter of heaven, Squatty, drunk on the sweat dripping from bare breasts.And I grow leaner, or as lean as the heavy years will let me, Staking the dahlias, trimming the yews, edging the mossFrom the terrace stones, my back barbecued under the wet sun. I’m on my …
The closer to the torso, the better. Endangered: fingers in a point,nosetips, every blooded sword,the knife’s ricasso, the cupid’s bow of lips,a Roman nose, the dog’s upturned gaze, the placid expression, the fierce.Toes hidden beneath sandals fare better: Every mother knows this.Somewhere, a breeze so strong it stirs the stone robe’s folds.Imperial porphyry: Understandthat of …
Statement—held till it melts—I’m sorry. We’ve come to in a dark green house, under slenderfurred eaves.Far croak of the chough, wrinkle of bats.The sun brushes the larch needles, sweat beads a tiny copper kettle—it burns my palm, it is cold when I lay my palm on it.In this room, three walls of loosely plotted novels.And …