A year ago if somebody had said AstraZeneca I would have thought South African tennis player, German sports car the hot AK47 toting freedom fighter that was my imaginary, Nazi slaughtering, girlfriend in a war I was never in   Even the smugly lensed boffins in...

you go bats in bone dry dry flood of night light   night night   there’s no need now now to be so shy come and feed   the banquet in the tower   the table set w/ black flowers (the pollen is rust)   & great eggs cracked open a silver plate...

In the interest of time mothers move   stepwise and as for her a lingering in Mexico City we lost touch some time ago, my mother reflects moodily. it is a   Monday afternoon and my world’s gone positively Popsicular   the grass was this euphoric...

Abnormal, a condition; a way of life; an indicator of otherness; you. Achievement, you are the aggregate sum of these. Anorexic, the condition of your identical twin sister in the seventh grade. You are the “fat twin.” Appearance, how others may tell you your story....

Up the bent walk to the house door, stops at the steps, smells the dryness of fall in the late October air.   Remembers something as the breeze tousles his hair and forgets for a moment the key in his hand.   Something a young girl said, maybe, or a woman...

Heavy weighted blanket, legs half-out, rain against the window, you whispered, “what if it gets old? what if you get bored with me?” “It won’t and I won’t,” I said. “But if.” “If?” The smell of warm linen, chest swelling like infatuation. Oh honey, it would be a...

Logistics, 2020   How many bodies can be held in refrigerated trailers, giving families time to claim them?   The number of those, anonymous, buried at the public cemetery in New York, increased five-fold in April.   Outside a Brooklyn funeral home,...

Restless in pleasure’s absence, I watched when my mother woke, startled by a rooster that chimed and paced on the barbed wire fence.   She pulled the sheet over her shoulder, sank into the cushion and lingered a moment longer while I pretended to be asleep....

A Yezidi woman sits across from me her eyes are flat black like no eyes should look as if her spirit has been sucked backward through her body to fly away somewhere else somewhere safe before Kocho Sinjar.   “Is it true?” her handler asks me “Is it true what ISIS...

They drifted west from the North and South to taste a common dust in the rearguard of uncommitted cows,   Surprised maybe that they could dig their spurs cooperatively into the partisan enterprises of ubiquitous rustlers.   Pinned down in a wallow, fighting...

is harvesting eyebrows grown in a petri dish teeming with a mixture of Minoxidil, Finasteride, (think recent, indecent President), sandalwood oil, lavender, rosemary, and thyme oils, or a mixture of hippopotamus fat, crocodile, tomcat, snake and ibex oils....

Take your sorrow soup, sour mash of sand that slipped through your mother’s hands on days spent resenting a husband’s regretful weakness. Trickle in the salt from old wounds, sprinkle an ounce of onion tears over whatever meat you can trim from the fat on her old...

The land in Nevada seems barren like evil witch skin until you get a better view. Start with a   close-up of crater valley, five shades of brown, the ochre lip of serious plummage, cracked ridge,   circular but not perfectly so, its irregular features...

charlotte said   there are times when i feel like i’m observing myself from a constellated distance in the same way one would look at a starry sky or a pastoral scene or a bloody gory picture show   and when i see myself   in this way   i am...