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 …
Associate Editor Andy Sia: There is a propulsive quality to Kylan Rice’s poem and lines, as if willing toward the central desire of the poem. As the poem unfolds, it picks up on an array of material textures and particularities—from agriculture, from manufacturing, from engineering—coalescing into a felt impression of place. While the titular Biblical verse is …
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, …
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 …
I set to work on the healing loom I let the loom-weights fall I let the loom-weights stutter.In the dark they spoke indifferently about suffering.In the dark they may have been something else entirely but I was not with them in the dark.I washed my face it was morning the flowers like flayed hands. Whose …
It is nearly true: I am learning to love the ellipsis like a waitfor a kiss as you stir-fry dinner, little uptick at your lips because you know. You knowI wait impatiently, genetically, my mother’s eyes, blue fishbowls, pop, she is certain she can’t breathe if I delaya confirmation of ease: are we well? Who …