He did not say you were a crash survivor Only that you postponed Death In an era between Earth seconds On a planet where Hold-onto things Shatter And re-form, like something less human More nimble While the candy-store gangsters And digital priests Tell us otherwise...

There is nothing more that we can do. His mouth closed firmly like a window sash. His face composed like laid brick. Her every nerve thrumming.   His mouth closed firmly like a window sash. Her fingers, face muscles, pudenda alert. Her every nerve thrumming. So...

Mural: St. Croix   A sailboat and its white hull floating on the water like a grimace or lopsided moon. How the banana daquiri’s implosions of flavor echoed on my tongue while the bartender stuffed a blender with five bananas for my 2nd. Tom and I. How our...

Last Day of Magic   For example, when you take a funhouse seriously, you’ll want mirrors to keep the world inside the glass from falling out like a labryinth into the future or the past for all to see—the ceiling, the floor, the plywood with splinters spliced...

Eagles changed their migration routes across Ukraine to avoid fighting and because their habitats were likely damaged or destroyed by war, say scientists. - BBC 22/5/2024   to pick an enemy is no easy matter. there are no half-measures, no fair-weather enemies. your...

while we play about our mother’s feet potatoes spill from their netted bag across the countertop   knife in hand, my mother chooses a dusty one, washes it, turns it, strips it to pale flesh   brown peels fall into the kitchen sink with a nimble pivot of her...

Speak for yourself. Bet on your own naked wanting, which is also a losing dog. Who are you to say I ever lived a half-life? Like copacetic isotopes of love. What a waste of clean pain. Oh well, almost green with aliveness choosing to say nothing over forgiveness....

In youth we dawdle over flesh in the water, primed for our prime like an irreducible number. Reaping dividends from Arctic melt, we look to the parity of starlight and the perennial rotation of ground-level fuel. Nefarious grains grow row upon row on a landscape...

Three First Grade Boys on the Titanic   Three boys squat in the Book Corner looking down at the open heart of history.   One boy exclaims: I wish I was on the Titanic.   Another replies with logic: You can’t be on it.   A third who knows about attention...

My kid won’t go to school anymore. Morning finds her buried in her sleep, her father at her door pleading. We were violent at first, me throwing off her covers, she kicking. She bit me once. Now we have a pattern, I beg a short time through her hollow door. She clings...

the fireworks are cracking open the air and I’ve had just about enough of America after serving people hot dogs all day and watching people eat them on TV so I march into the woods into the mud into the pond into my salamander skin. I bury myself in the clag until...

after Joy Harjo   Clear a space for yourself.  This includes time. No thinking, no ideas, no answers, no logic, no reasons. Stand against productivity. Don’t be afraid to put the needs of others out of your mind. The light, predawn or evening, works its private...

Humming like a subterranean network sized computer is a fear that if I ever meet my creator, They will not resemble me –   only appear as an abstract painting, less resolution than myself and I will look at Them, and They, unthinkingly will stare through me...

This ash-gray mouse asleep in my pocket, this miserable list crumpled in my pocket, this comet rattling around in there, in the cluttered pocket, unable to escape.   No squeaks—shy twitching of gray wire whiskers, no pencil or ink—tea stains on tissue, no...

After I share my secrets, I’ll remind you to Burn them in a pyre when my body’s ash. Carry my regret, silence in stone. Feel the weight. Deny my mysteries. The loudest plead for light. Euphemisms are hallucinations of language. Forget what I tell you. No. Remember....

It is a ritual to bathe the daughter. Baptized, she purifies dirty water, rinsed over long hair that falls out between fingers. Years ago, we handed her to a man over a vat and believed him when he said she would not drown.   Face down, screams dull; Reverberated...

The boy loves lying in this open field, blinking at the bowl of summer sky. Heedless of wiregrass itching his neck, of ants sizing up his ears, he tracks the somber wings that float and swoop in primordial arcs as though suspended from puppeteer’s strings. Still as a...

The first time you get the wind knocked out of you, you will be astonished by what seems a fatal wallop— one moment running, the next, bulge-eyed and gaping like a carp tossed in a rowboat. No one prepares us. We face this first shock as innocents, unwarned of the...

Indoctrinating myself I shuffle towards the polls And pull the lever Expecting a trapdoor to open up And plunge me into the awaiting waters below The Styx or just a secret underground channel Leading perhaps to the East River They’re both abysmal passages Whichever...