He was born too soon and almost too late—my boy trapped in my womb—blood singing and hot for lightbought too dearly, the air beating its fist in his chest against a sealed door.O blue of the blood unsuffused, blue of his blue Vishnu face before his first breath. The cordbroke too soon with him still …
Smell of mothball and sweat and gin,the secondhand wool suit your father wore while he paced all night in light rain.Smell of wet salt through the sliding glass door; on the cinder-block deck, step-step and turn.Two miles to the south the plug’s been pulled on your slow inward torque and returnto the womb. Here, your …
Forgive me, I should have asked questions, but I am not a ditherer. You stressed the cost-benefit, pleaded the price of cucumber and alfalfa, pitted the rustle of wood chips over the flushof cash, insisted you would fetch no more than thirty bucks secondhand with no equipment included,but I knew I could never abide the …
Today slicing sourdough my finger beaded with blood Once I cut my palm so deep the wound was bloodless and now I’m back in the grove beyond the fence memories flapping hard in my chest thieving bloodoranges filling my backpackI used to come here at night hungry hot-bloodedneeding to still my hands I used to …
I find three watches in my dead father’s room. Three watches in my father’s room: dead.My father’s dead watches; there are three.In my father’s dead room I find three watches. Dead room, three watches, I find my father.I find my father, dead. Three watches.Three rooms (I find) in my dead father’s watches. Find my watches, …
Artist’s Statement I work in the realm of digital materiality, creating objects through interwoven digital processing, evoking the unity of the material and the digital while exploring postfeminist identity. I am interested in creating iconographic taxonomies that transcend the idea of the mothering body, moving it into visually exquisite and grotesque constructions: mothers in production, …
when I board the plane my seatmate is already holding a paperback book and I smilerelieved because on the airport shuttletwo young musicians had argued the whole way about a certain Celtic tune was it Irishor Scottish a matter of possessiona printed score in a Glasgow librarydidn’t that prove it on the Scottish side and …
They say they cannot find you, where you arefrom, Senegambia or so, from a land where women eat gold to heal their skin and soften their gums.Your voice none could avoid. You wroteto surprise yourself; possessed by the spirit of language, you disentombed the stories lined in the cartilage of your eardrums.Your mothers must have …
“The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about—subjects.” “The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about—bric-a-brac.” —Meeting between Frost and Stevens After the storm,when the green clouds leave, retreating over moundsof shard-filled rubble,the desperate climb those hills looking for . . . what?Irreplaceable nothings:a yearbook with its falling-out bits of ribbon …
My older sisters warned me about Ellen Osborne, the high-school substitute teacher with a big mouth. I can see her framed in the classroom’s doorjamb, her eyes dark and sharp like a hawk’s. Despite being a Quaker, Ms. Osborne wasn’t big on the virtue of silence. She preferred to shout the latest news down the …