Easy to see, when Robin Williams died, why we mourned on social pages the touched friend we did not know. Or knew the way one knows,by the hair on our necks, a storm will comeand make our sleep a little easier and deep.Surely the hole in us was evidence earth hadmoved, a share of us …
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us . . . a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam . . . the only home we’ve ever known. —Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (1994) Drill, baby, drill! —Michael Steele, 2008 Republican National Convention Photographed from 18,000 miles in 1972, Earth had the …
The voice on the radio says, I do not know music, but I know what I like. Or was it, I like what I know.Either way I understand. Though it seems that must be half a man talking, the other half the radio we talk over,and a friend drops by to say this morning he …
It is over almost before it begins: the blade drawn quickand deep across the throat, airexhaling softly from the trachea as the body slackens into its final posture.The mouth gapes. Its lips pucker into the meditative Oof a sunfish held snug as you work to free the hook. Morphinemade the sleep deep, and though darkblood …
With the fall of rain across the landsHad enough of the sea And seasons had enoughThe wheelchair and seasons came inside Then sirens and closed airportsThe wheelchair came inside sat with us As a guest of rain without shoes Then sirens sat with usIn Persian without shoes At the gate up ahead Envelopes called her …
Are they bigger than a breadbox? Can you hide them in a carry-on? Heavier than a gun?Can you separate them?Are they typically found in a civilized nation? Are they functional?Were they made in the USA? Are they soft?Made of flesh?Hairy?Will they fight back?Are they darker than you? Do they have tongues?Are they bigger on television? …
My mother is an empress of the closed mouth. She can look at any stone and decree it commonwithout saying a word. She sleeps with a revolver under her pillow in a bed of diamonds and sweat.When they came for our people, she tells me,your grandmother hid an entire chandelier in her jaw.My mother forces …
I disappear as I turn sideways, dissolving into the split wall, humming as my face rests in the white light of the refrigerator.I can survive here for years, hiding out within the kitchen walls, between white bread, Milanos, a jar of stone mustard, a rotting bell pepper.So much of me turns into nothing. In the …
in the South, a body might do that, orit makes a body feel some type of way.Here rounding at the knees to support the body as it carries my keepings up the hill; wrists in coats as a body walks around the city; picked a hair from my shoulder, but it wasn’t my hair. A …
The bull kelp’s lines runlateral to the shore. They swing through the brack: loose rumor shivering larger as it spreads.From land the kelp punctuatesthe difference, stipples a space not here and not yet deep, and salt breathes from the split. I am herebecause there are no dead. To walk in their shoesis unlucky, to lose …