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
SAM WASN'T UNHAPPY to be called back to work so soon after little Gracie’s funeral. For the past two weeks since he’d challenged the psychic that Maura brought into their house she hardly answered him when he spoke to her, hardly looked at him. His home was a lonely place and despite himself he was … Continue reading The Oracle
Time becomes a butterfly with a broken wing humming in my hands; like it, I have been subdividing myself, dotting my poems with the blood beading on my cuticles, my mind as the land left on its own, riding out the cold. This is our hard stone over downy pillow, the mint on our palms … Continue reading Phrenospasms
The dark waters teem with catfish. You might catch one by casting a line and letting it flow downstream, the hook tumbling with the current, hoping one gifts you with a bite before the spool reaches its conclusion. This is the manifest of our destiny: to sponge water from the mountains and cut scars into … Continue reading Aqueduct
IF HE POSITIONS his head perfectly, it’ll align with the drops of water streaming down his head and ears so he can’t hear. He becomes born again, without hearing. Instead: vibrations that soothe and shut things out. Long showers have always been his “thing.” Letting them whisk him away. Fleeing stupidity-riddled reality tidbits that munch … Continue reading Painkillers