She was right, you do resemble the moon. A vision. Dim light The opening of a mouth, a door, a soul I reach my fingers through your corridors “Am I interrupting?” It’s a delicate space, pink rooms filled with glass The tip of my toes trying hard not to touch them I was never one … Continue reading fans over knobs
Sean Doherty slammed the big glass door open and stormed across the lobby toward his office. “Sean?” Terry, the receptionist, looked up in surprise. “Trouble with Cramer again?” “With Cramer? Never. He’s a paragon of clienthood! A saint!” Sean threw his notebook down the hallway ahead of him and ripped off his tweed jacket. When … Continue reading Working Title
FOR A MOMENT she pictured herself living somewhere else. Somewhere far away where women fixed things in order to live… in some desert somewhere or in a war-torn town… walking home from the vegetable market with a basket balanced on her head. She was connected in some way to all of them. For a moment … Continue reading There Was A Falseness To Her Life
THE MAN BEHIND the Venetian blinds never knew whether it was sunrise or sunset. He would wake up in his leatherette armchair, or on the ratty sofa he kept for naps. He would wake up next to his soft pack of cigarettes, his pint of bourbon. He was waiting. He had been told a leggy … Continue reading Private Eye
Lincoln published poems in the Springfield paper dripping with daggers and cries in the dark Styron filled pages with treacherous weather howling tempests and horrific gray drizzle for me — it’s a dime-store black plastic mask I wore as a child on Halloween the kind with the two impractical nose holes and the … Continue reading Use Metaphors to Describe Your Depression
time slipped from our grasp and like a moony girl we clung harder to our holy texts filtering out life’s variegated strings, jaws of spit tautening in the crevices a mouth wishing only for a better pair of breasts. candles melted at windowsills the heart rolled in the earth’s slip — judgement, self-flagellation, pity — … Continue reading We Lived This Way For Years
my mother tells me about the symmetry of the roses on her own mother’s headstone how they hold within that ancient compressed animal her spirit — and in the end we are sitting on a bench in the garden I blunting the silence seeded between her and my childhood — the wind snapping the echinacea … Continue reading The Ending Is A Sharp Point To How I Was
In high school health class we measured our body fat percentages in front of our peers. I’ve passed out three times in my life. One of them was there. We were watching a Dr. Phil segment on anorexic teenagers in order to learn about the dangers of eating disorders. I misread emaciated as emancipated on … Continue reading Metaphysical Twitch
Set out to gather words like field flowers, vine ripe vocabulary hung low from crooked branches, and all too often, I’ve failed the harvest. Can’t compose from stocked shelves, would rather see those redwoods at the edge of flame, bright tulip fields bending in the wind, the apple branches laden with flowers, with bees, with … Continue reading On Writing
Clinging to a garden wall, I warn axes going up across the field to go dark, to burn far less. They have control of everything and really only answer to themselves. In a crazy manner, I crash into a crab harvest, shooting meteoric patterns of color over schoolroom windows. As the world loses doors with … Continue reading Sudden Illumination