i can’t remember how to write a good poemheidegger says writing a poem is making a voyage of discovery i don’t know what a pack rat is but i’d like to be onelook at this hymn to possibility ur paper-tiger confidenceour fluctuations their ongoingnessregrets, we have too manyinsistent as the low rumble of a maseratiwere …
or chrome or canals in the desert, there was a man who looked like youand a woman who looked like me, their faces unknown to themselves.In a house of hair, on the night of their wedding, they undress,cast their robes like beetles shedding, the beginning of skin,the beginning of breaking. He holds her by the …
this is what you’ll never find: VHS cassette reeling until you’re young again; tape-head cleaner in an eye-drop bottlestored above room temperature. remember when, midaction, you push on ejectto use the rewinder until the spoolruns out of breath, the other lung so dark & full the past recreates itself; father’s vinyl player turns a song …
many things have marked you as the alien already here in the New World and so you were not pretending when you pronounced the word: Arkansas, you who have crossed the Atlantic bruised with jet lag and vertigostressing the second syllable, upon descent from the sky, nobody on the floor could un derstand when you …
One August Thursday morning, shortly after my sister, Amanda, turned twenty, I steered our blue Volkswagen into the foothills of the Allegheny National Forest. The clouds hung low, the air milky: a beautiful day in northwest Pennsylvania. I’d planned an excursion into the wilderness, just the two of us, to be followed by cheeseburgers at …
my best friend chenay is afraid of heights. she swears humans only have bones just to anchor us to the ground. otherwise—we’d all float up to the sky, graveyard. that’s why she’s on her ass right now, denim shorts traveling across gravel & dirt, moving about five centimeters a minute, as we descend a windy …
according to late-night-sofa stories, when my mom & dad were getting a divorce, my dad hid all five of us kids from our mom, for two whole weeks. my mom was said to be running around with a sunburned man, getting high on moonlit drugs, & forgetting she was a mother. i was still fresh …
I Last week I stuck my son in the scalp with a sewing pin. He did not scream. He did not cry. He said, What was that thing, Mama? The boy sat with me at the table, in my lap, and I hunched around him, patching over the couch’s slipcover with navy pinstripe wool. It …
“I’m not looking forward to taking out the trash in this heat,” said Cedric as he tied the full bags closed, hoisted them out of the cans, placed them on the dolly, and got ready to head into the dense August St. Louis night. “Working in a restaurant kitchen is a tough job for someone …
Since April 2017, the first anniversary of my foster brother’s death, I’ve opened my Schirmer’s edition of Beethoven’s complete sonatas and sat at the piano for half of each day, replaying songs I’ve known since I was a child. I repeat the ritual two to five times a year, during important dates of our relationship. …