The boy’s feet are bound to the floor, body held before a mirror. Cold lake, the glass spinning his near-naked body into fable, or cautionary tale. How, how it sings back. Diamond-toothed doppelgänger. The chambered hallways of his heart bisected, something like a...

Sun again:   that geode cold light that briefly splits the granite sky:   storms there: storms there: darker because of this temporary brightness.   The first shadows in a week like inkfade ancient tattoos impermanent crease crosshatched on the last of...

If I count the times I cried today, I would need more than two hands— an 81 year old passes through security and tells me her mother just stopped driving yesterday at the age of 108; a woman at the counter hands me my coffee and says Here, baby; and when we are lining...

It’s a pleasure to meet you…just water is fine… Thanks for taking the trouble to give me a chance. So, you’ve made it at last to the back of the line and the candidate worth just a cursory glance?   Inconspicuous as the invisible man, I’ve a resume anyone sane...

I can’t unsee firefighters hanging around our living room like uninvited guests at a party   waiting with my wife in case her heart attack arrives before the ambulance does, each man   scanning the room inch by inch as if flames might burst from a bookcase,...

I’ve rehearsed this in my mind countless times– Put the broom or cardboard scrap on far side of carcass Place scoop– something thin and stiff yet flexible, at near edge Draw broom towards scoop– towards myself   This is where the problem lies– no matter what tool...

it is human nature to want to build something substantial and wonder why our bridges fall   like fever. upon conversion from spruce to roof, the eastern hemlock remains square-shouldered   unhungry for sun. a hospital falls in the forest and everyone can...

There were orchards here once and creeks that ran all the way to July.   In those days, we could cross one on foot and up the embankment on the other side, just below the walnut grove, long gone, as well as deer who lay in the tall grass and flew at our scent....

(an early Halloween)   Mildred has a gash on her forehead where the hatchet from her boyfriend split the bone. Nearby, there is a skeleton hanging by its left foot from a small maple-oak across the way. The rail fence is shattered where the van with thirty-two...

1900's high tech vocabulary comes to mind. Following the stapler, stethoscopes, steam locomotives, safety pins, and tungsten steel much spoken of in our metallurgist's family where Dad won a Bessemer medal and we all hazarded a worry while stepping into the Barney's...

Today’s sky is a weak imitation of blue. She slips in the back door, a line cook at the brasserie in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, well-known for duck, well-known for drifters and dreamers, lovers long gone and those newly found. The man at the bar will lie his way into any...

Hook mouthed; a cadaver turns to kiss me— Danny—adrift through skin, grabs   my filament of fishing line, pulling back to bloom. He wears a lesion,   maybe three, dark and almost blued to midnight, tells me it’s a birthmark   I’ve forgotten. The dream...

Alice Chu lives in Chongqing and she attends classes online loves hotpots and her friends never submits work on time can’t follow essay instructions but she speaks perfect English and writes crystalline sentences a potential poet or a novelist but her father has other...

Post Break-up Souvenir Shopping, Naples   No to the limoncello, liquid sunshine in hand-painted glass bottles. No to the porcelain-handled pizza cutters poised to slice a pie. Nope to the floral-print tablecloth/napkin sets, nope to Deruta pottery blue-rimmed...

my mother dreams of taking off in a hot air balloon, not exactly flying but rising, a slow-motion escape fueled by the hiss of flame parachute silk and her breath- held longing to be lifted from ground   she collects postcards and prints of antique airships and...