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 …
Four months in, Dad called me onto the porchwhere he and two of his buddies were trying to shoot PBR cans off the banister. Splintering woodunder a Sturgeon Moon, a classification I had learned in Ms. Eddy’s class.I used to like when she pointed at the gaping holes in my shirts and shook her headuntil …
Associate Editor Kate Jayroe: Marei’s stunningly vivid poem captures the raw enormity of grief through a proliferation of ephemeral images, each flickering and shifting before us like the mesmerist dance of flame. It’s a poem readers will return to, each time sensing something new in the seen. Listen to Anaya Marei read the poem: Note: The …
Far from cul-de-sacs and cookie-cutter samesies I could let you kneel to trace my inlaid floor,but before we measure, or speak of any orthodoxies, let me whisper a little ruin in your ear:Know the thirst of water pooling against a foundation? Parched roots testing each seam of a pipe?I do. So if I won’t have …