after (and with a phrase from) Tara Bray’s “Memoir”Once, I watched my dad kill a hen we’d reared for years; watched my brother carry its small limp body. Why?I cried. Her neck is bleeding now. Everyone laughed.I refused to eat its meat. I could not fathom the betrayal.A friend at school loved his sheep so …
Great wheel pushing the river behind it Under it the unattractive paddle cat Not many left they say who’d knowso opaque with every state’s topsoil even the water is feeling its way Missouri Mississippi mingling esses You put in a verb just to let off steam They make fun of how you say calliope
Sound effects are a parallel life made of common materials wood blocks for hooves et cetera I hear thunder above a prairieI know to be shaken aluminum I know there is a horse under it not needing to be fed or broken
it’s still Oklahoma: apocalyptic orangelight reaches through winter hair-trees, over smooth stucco shell of the Holiday Inn (which can take the color of cloud cover, nuclear mauve, Friday night money).It says: Come out onto the dirt. Which was earth when asphalt was grass, a core going deepas lake water under ice I’ve stood on,screwed through …
The Human Microbiome Project claims we are not alone, at a ratio that ranges from 3:1 to 1:1 human to nonhuman cells. But even the largest, most animallike members of the human microbiome—think hookworms—are tough to regard as cozy companions. Still, I want to nourish all, for my sake. Enter vinegar and gulp down a …
Prepare for interrogation. Better not get any tattoos. They give you away. Better learn to like rope burn. Straw-berry kisses. Better train-up for silence; learn the thick coolof ice cream so it fills the mouth on command. You’ll need some-thing for the dry hole (once screaming) when they turn from the lash to the burrow …
Briskly or inch- meal, fullmoon or half moon or new as a nickel, in white tie and tails, in China Sea pearls, at a diner or a finer establishment with silver or pewter accoutrements. Swallow it skimmed from a lake or plucked from a pond, withivory chopsticks, from a flute or a flask, from a …
the sky is ordinary.today in 2010 I lost my grandfather.I kiss my little dog’s head and thinkI have never been closer to another skull.the first time I saw a parrotI decided he must be a monster.when people first saw telegramsthey decided each was from their dead.I could find a sign anywhere I wanted if I …
indebted to The Love Witch, Hélène Cixous’s “What is it o’clock? or The door (we never enter),” Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, and Mark J. Blechner’s The Dream Frontierthe night I watched The Love Witch dreamt of walking through a field field in every direction night gathered at the hip boneI might have been naked …
All her medical reports, both spectacles, Betadine, banknotes she leafed on a copper arati tray carrying a small dia, cold bandages colored in her bedsores, seven different kinds of talcum to ward off skin infections, body odor of seagull—a current of twilight, a largebottle of hand sanitizer, ORS sachets, glucose powder, multivitamin syrups with festive …