Dry, brown pine needles drop off the tree onto the tarmac. The police watch from a safe distance. A fox goes back and covers his tracks. Less than a week later, a museum worker discovers a Da Vinci sketch of an electric car in an old trunk in the attic. A man with a plummy … Continue reading Requiem
ON PEARLIZED INVITATIONS, the words, “newborn babies required,” swirl above debossed emblems of storks. If potential guests are paying attention, they’ll see droplets falling from the satchel the stork is carrying, and they’ll probably think it has something to do with freshness and new life — and maybe it does. Mom insists on these hand-crafted … Continue reading The Pleasure of Your Company, and Babies, Requested for a Celebration of the Union of our Marriage
When you wrote the bloodhounds and bandages into the script it was a question of refuting the silence, of torching the thread on the way out of the labyrinth They will say you are a poor excuse for a wanderer, that you're still milling about the big summer when you were twelve and the one … Continue reading No More Summers
If you search people who play golf with no hands on the internet you will meet a neighbor kid from my childhood who lived in the fancy house down the street. He plays golf, the internet says, plays golf with no hands. The internet says that neighbor kid got electrocuted 35 years ago and now … Continue reading Advantages of the Internet
Let’s say stars can talk in conversations like the one we had last night about how fast life goes by us, about friends we’ve lost who have relinquished their shine in this universe and what if stars too could say things like we can’t believe Antares is gone, it seems like only twelve billion years … Continue reading My Stupid Little Life
I promised I wouldn't come back until I had no urge to doodle on the galaxy walls. In the remnants of the waiting room it was all up for grabs – the money I should have hidden away, the heart I should have released. The woman at the head of the circle made me promise to out-design my … Continue reading And This is What it Means to be Awake for It
Customers would try on baseball jerseys and eagerly turn in front of a full-length mirror to see someone else’s name stitched on their back. They’d ask for the tag to be cut, and walk out with the jersey still on, the shirt they had worn in balled in a shopping bag. Who knows where they … Continue reading Names
I buy a fire engine just in case and look for signs of beetle kill in every tree that I climb to retreat for a while. There is something sublime about a lone red trash can filled with flames, steam wafting off tailpipes on a cold morning, the town whiskey spigot clogged and backing up … Continue reading Exhaust
I met a man I barely knew for tea — to see if I might catch the tail of something hard to hold, the way we do when we hear it’s raining meteors. In mere counter-moments we were mourning milestones robbed by frost — promises made mummies destined to summer, tombs on limbs. My insides … Continue reading Interrupted Magnolias
Listen: there’s nothing that can be done about it. Continents will drift about like bumper cars and the stars will spin drunkenly in the dark and atoms will slowly degrade into lesser atoms and sex and death will jostle for supremacy and it all happens well outside of our grasp. So who cares if my … Continue reading Poem for my Neighbors