The velvet ant is not velvet, not ant. It is a wasp, grooved with sting. If scooped into the muzzle of a lizard, the velvet ant (not velvet, not ant) jackhammers. Its whole body is ammunition. They call it cow killer. Yet it is beautiful, too: encased in orange & white thistle. Spotted red & …
When at lastthe last fires burnt out upon the prairie,trains could be heard passing,mournful as whales. There’s no remedy to beingsecond-rate, I heard the brakeman sayas he & his red light were pulledforever into Missouri. But still I waitedfor you like a radio tower, blinkingquietly in the night. See more poems from Issue 17.1 by …
ROSALIND: They say you are a melancholy fellow.JAQUES: I am so; I do love it better than laughing.—As You Like It Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.—Oscar Levant, An American in Paris Oscar Levant is a melancholy figure, full of barbed wit, self-loathing, and Rhapsody in Blue, which he performed more …
You can see them, if you look closely, in all the old photographs: my fingers flush at the knuckles and nails, squeezed tight as window blinds so no light can slip between. It’s Christmastime in this one. We’re standing in front of the flocked plastic tree. The parcels beneath it, shiny gold with silver bows, …
Be easy. No—Be smooth enough that you don’t have to be as hard as a four-year-old saying “hydrangeas” is what he’d say. He said it as slick as an ice cube sliding on itself or as a puck coasting toward goal. Maybe that’s what made him a Boston weed man, or maybe being a weed …
over dumplings & rice, Nancy says you’re welcomeas she considers her ancestors & the goldsthey left, a mug of oolong clenched in her hands, tightclaws. for the plants & their leaves you steep, the anti-oxidants, the paper, the bark, the silk of the insects.you’re welcome for the gunpowder, for the colorunfurling across the cloudless dark. …
