In the house of my past I saw them paired on the porch I have wanted all this time, a place to sit and rock, eyes on weather crossing the sky like sheep. I have wanted to sit, in the film’s last scene, by the shepherd, to be the woman he wanted, eyes over the […]
How quickly she cleaned her knife, your blood now on the cleaning cloth. How quickly she prided herself in forgiving you for overreacting. What a good friend. “Liar,” she said, then “drama,” and now it’s “water under a bridge” apparently. She doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, but she forced you to drink that […]
Chickens once dotted the yard, overrunning the lawn like soft white dandelion seed heads. Intolerable mean girls, the hens reared aggressive when the one I named Olive wanted her share of patio shade or watermelon seeds. Olive suffered in silence, separate when the others fought over worms, but she’d edge close hopeful for scraps. It […]
I dug, I broke ground, through clay littered with rocks upon rocks. The metallic ring of the shovel hitting stone rung up my arms with the same aching vibration of a taut violin string plucked. From my fingertips the smallest seeds scattered and tamped. Morning and night, weighted down with water jugs that smacked against […]
I imagined my striptease from silk a color-blue clarity; limbs loudly posed, wing spanned; songbird story that goes with the tattoo ink engraved beneath shoulder. The limit does not exist. Walking away from my chrysalis, I felt unmoving. Listless life an art gallery of black-and-white memory I begged myself to burn ocean swept. I begged […]
nocturnal, elusivearmour of scalesthis is how I grow upeach summer half an inch taller each monsoonpeeling shallotsplucking scram berriesburrowing into poetry he fingers my bellyhere here herethere is a baby in therehe says, before I get drunk stagnant red pool burstinto rag clotheswe washed and hung dryin sunless annexe on weekend zoo visits children jeer […]
1. The sacrifice is loss of the familiar body. 2. The prize is the freedom of flight, a new face, and pristine unknown form. 3. The mummified pupa unwinds. 4. Inside the chrysalis, space between touch, the pupa dissolves. 5. In tomb, light becomes lighter, determined to quicken, turns and hardens. 6. The waiting, five to […]
I know I am the parasite – I pulled those weeds. Tore out the shrubs where the skunk used to sleep. My hands in the earth where my ancestral violence seeps, its muddy mouth belching bitter heat. This is my autumn apology. I wake and regret the milkweed I murdered before it could seed. […]
The curve of each treeis a record of windand sun, a memory ofwhat the Earth said.Each river winds the same,encoding memory in erosion,creation in destruction.In this way, thingsare already bookswithout language. I am a dust storm of a thousandthousand particles. I am suspendedin air, I float on a current of sunbeams,I am always falling down […]
By Abbey Gate did they wait, hives of humanity confined in a makeshift holding pattern, their hopes in hand, desperate for rescue, a shimmering mirage that appeared at a distance but that never arrived, in the event outpaced by a resonant blast shuddering the earth and imbruing pavement with crimson puddles, hatred’s sudden signature. Elsewhere, […]
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