“It’s time to get drunk” —Charles Baudelaire We’re inside the barrel of a heat wave, my abstinent partner and I.The earth, the sky, the strange Nevada sun blazingin between. A tattooed river courses up his pale forearm, and a single moustached koi threads upstream, the fish rendered separate from its world.Across the table Hopeless Jack …
How about I’m sorry, and the air hereall damp salt, palming every page of every book to limp and silk. How about the goldenrod’salmost-gone, its flowers faded, grayed, but still clinging, still, up close, holdingthe shape of a kindergartner’s crayoned sun, heavenlyand rayed and simple. Always, here, wind, and the way it simplifies—tea with no …
The lyric fell from the Gulmohar branches soaring above the dry courtyard, floating right into my waiting mouth, upendedand hungry like a wicketkeeper’s sticky glove. The lyric didn’t possess the flesh of fruit or ball; it defied resemblanceto anything that came sealed with the legacy of gravity. Slimy yet firm, a prelude to skin, in …
Suddenly the goldfinches turn oddly obvious,but where am I fromthe morning at this point of day, turning words over into other words beforethey fumble from my mouth to a memory of wishingthe walking away hada different line of thought, but it never does in the way I think it will. The shadow of a cat …
(To use the PDF embedder to see all pages of the poem, use the arrows on the bottom left-hand side.) Text: scaled the summit of ovation in one leap / over that solemn broom, swept demons / away, were swept up and into a scheme / of tender mercies, salve for souls frayed / like …
I am impatientfor the sun to rise, for it to set, for the moonto put on its white mask, for the crow to startits daily lessons on love— how to slow it, howto hide in its switchbacks. Why can we love, then undo it?
Once, homes were made of plaster, powdered lime and sand, mixed in with horsehair.Where did they get the horsehair? Did they hurt the horse,did they just brush the hair off? Imagine each home,in the middle of the night, sounds of galloping in walls.
She says it turns out mice have chewed around the one tree outside her apartment, and now the tree will have difficulty drinking. The landscaper called it girdling. I shudder,thinking this could explain why my grandmother never huggedmy mother. She says mice are pretty sneaky and tend to feed on bark by burrowingabove ground beneath …
Maybe laid under two tons of dirt. Miles under sea level,pressed between blocks of cinder or other things that weighdown. Squeezedand held by aluminum cans, Styrofoam cups, half-eaten protein bars,in the trucks haul, only to be lost in compression. Closer, behindthe plaster, the drywall,the paint held up by the walls that brace your house, yourframe. …
(I knowthe ground still remembers)—That dayyou watchedas guns made the sound of many doors closing.A mother wandered through the fire of bullet and loose-lipped slur,after a small child (dressed both in smoke and panic). You hopedyour voice would raise faster than the shellsif only to ask her what use? You watched as several bodies, dislodgedfrom …