Let’s be done. An auditor of my imagination groans: I don’t know what to do with all of this. Well. At least we can agree that clearly, I don’t want any of them to faint in a beautiful arc. Manicure your own wilds, if you must, but I’m not in your cards. Don’t sow neat …
They say it sounds like thunder when snow breaksfrom the crag. Avalanchesafety training will teach youto put a hand in front of your face to create an air pocketbut he never got the chance. By the time the slide stopped he couldn’t move.This is how fastI imagine it. The bruises, the breaking branches,the ephemeral crystal …
This piece by Sun Tzu-ping is translated by Nicholas Wong You both take your mutual assaults as lovemaking In the swift leaps of languageWeapons go soft like the vocal cordWhen the city corrupts without warning youIt leaves no place for reconstruction or undoingWhat follows is a grateful celebrationYou remove the thorns and blades that gradually …
This piece by Sun Tzu-ping is translated by Nicholas Wong According to the traditional Chinese calendar, the Dragon Boat Festival (which falls on the fifth day of the fifth month of the year) is an ominous day. Another new disease was invented.We sat in protest, listening to God call out our names We drowned half …
One day a tooth was found where it oughtn’t have been. It was old. It was older than any other tooth that has ever been found, it was so old there were not even tooth faeries yet, or elsethere were only tooth faeries. Tooth faeries and Neanderthals.This person tooth, this Homo sapiens tooth, arrived eight …
This story of the Gurkhas—the new republic—we shall rewrite with ash. They burned the letters, Love. Above your signature, write: With Ash.Marigolds cut. The moon full on the window. The phone rings:We know where you live. A boy’s voice polite with ash.Enter a needle, exit a plowshare: the priests have gutted the temples.How could we, …
Dead leaves, sidewalk, black dog—empty, sunlit March street with pines, oil stains, someonewalking purposefully in the direction opposite yours on the other shore of the four-lane’s currentin a full suit of armor: plumed, visored helmet, heavy gauntlets, floating burgundy cape.When you raise your empty hand in greeting, his answer rattles melancholy’s padlockloose, a jackpot’s din …
You must trust me:slip your hand into the darkness of the wall-mounted mailbox.That dry, feathery something dusting you, knuckles to nails,is no cause for alarm, no enemy—just an ordinary brown moth, brown as the back of a stolen horse crossing a flood-stage river,brown as puddle water, as bark. She crawled inside near daybreak, the night …
after Muriel Rukeyser When I said I was grafted via arteryto the oldest tree in the forest, I lied—it was a lie when I said she was my mother.I know it was a lie because of the furtive way I let the words out of the dirty pen behind my heart.I lied when I said …
The middle of nowhere. A single contrail dissipates.The measured silence is song. : :The saint holds up His own flayed skin As if a cloak, as if a gift. : :Four of the six folding screens Painted a transparent gray wash Are the emptiness between peaks. : :Like an explicit story, The footpath up to …