If I try to get everything back, sometimes pure essence of a single flower is all that comes when I call. And sometimes, all I smell is the nothing of fire because flames only smell like whatever they’re consuming. But I keep hearing the slam of the oven door, the scuff of pointed shoes on […]
Ten, no, at least a dozen bagpipes groan across the gravel lot outside your window. Snare drums stutter as you grab the bottle and throw open the sash. The weekly crowd – which includes a woman whose right hand holds a vinyl shoe by Velcro straps, whose left guides at the elbow a man wearing […]
Recess A cartwheeling script of broken music notes tumbles from the tip of my pen: a row of children swinging their legs, propelling their bodies across monkey bars that flex between margins. Recess is cut short by rain. I blow my whistle & crumple the playground into a ball in my fist. I toss what’s […]
Under the tree-filtered sun, it’s Golden Hour and we sit sipping peaches. Gilded haze and sideways light make the finest bouillon. In this cathedral of days, we spin gossamer threads, weave the gold into our tresses. There’s a reason the eve’s last breaths are bullion – to squeeze the bellows of day, an accordion wheezing til […]
Sun blasts heat in yellow laughs but someday the sun will explode how all things do when they hold too much. Larger than trees the soft moon floats over the horizon glowing over the ocean bending at the edges. My eyes trace along the curve of the sea at night northern lights shimmer through darkness. […]
I knew a man, Mr. Marco Marsden, who lost his hand in a slaughterhouse. The story was different every time I heard it, but the version Mr. Marsden was most fond of was this: he was cutting up meat for market one day when he lost focus—he said that he was suddenly overcome with sympathy […]
How long can it possibly take a supposedly motivated shop-rat to cash a paycheck, minus the $5 fee, knock back just one draft, as he promised, then buy six for the road? For the umpteenth time, Hector Fritch consults his wristwatch in the dashboard lights. And now a cold, early April rain has begun to […]
It starts in Canyon Creek Hospital, where, on Sunday mornings, he waits for his mother to die. She rasps my name as I come to stand behind him. But all I hear is beep, beep, beep: a funeral march for velocity. Each week there is a little less of her, another inch of bone […]
I’ll hobble into the foothills to stand half-blind in the lilted dark above the draw, looking out over the valley where I was birthed and brought up. Later, in bed, my lover’s finger will circle the bruises on my back, each drummed violently into being— She might compare them to islands or flat blueberries. In […]
My mother grows delphinium, foxglove, zinnia, plucks the dew laden morning. With a storm of petals, she anoints my waking in a chaos of tenderness. My father shows me winter’s stark branches, its naked sky, washes my eyes in the deep blue of dusk. Fullness, woven by light, intoxicated by color, reels with […]
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