It’s made its nest here in the central mind. It spreads its metal wings, and lays its plastic eggs leaving its engine on — you scarcely hear the whisper of your wife even though every window’s closed, the moon passing alone, the last of stars extinguished by the haze of morning, before the first long … Continue reading The Machine
the word that always springs to mind is d e s t r o y — hot fire licks my soot-clogged throat, sluggish cells struggle upstream in syrupy veins, & the perpetually peeking sun drowns me like a rash & sloppy pour inspired by tepid dreams, icy shame, & a half-forgotten past that haunts me … Continue reading The Magic School Bus slipped inside me but never broke its way back out
She wears jeans with flowers and lace and watches the fascinating games of men, football, soccer, sundry other competitions. She wants to write the ballad of too late, where they strike iron when reality has cooled way down and merely makes a sound but not much difference, all the while knowing that, though nobody looks, … Continue reading Game Night
I’m not like you, I think as I timidly take one of three remaining seats. I already know I am mistaken, though. I am the white-haired woman with the walker and the fluid bottle attached to her arm and the belly spilling forward. I am the skinny blonde sitting next to me. I am the … Continue reading On The Bus
By then I was tired of your ballet jokes. Our Thirty Years War started with a sequence of red roofs and a glimpse of the Žižkov TV Tower. Kundera called Prague a disappearing poem. I don’t know. I drank Velvet beerwith girls in Slayer shirts; You drank boys. The moon drank blood. The two Josephs … Continue reading Friends & Neighbors
Summer is peak King — Stephen, not Charles or Frederik. I almost died swimming to the floating raft at Gilbert Lake. The moon is jerking me around. Stars fall out of the sky like doorknobs and in every dream I’m in an abandoned hotel in the Catskills. First love, too late — and now… what … Continue reading Cheap Art
after the movie, riding elevators down between three lobby floors: past the concessions and the bar which would serve us these sweet apple cocktails on Fridays between pictures when we were 16. the carpet the same as it was then, with probably popcorn rinds we dropped still in place: why would anyone vacuum a cinema? … Continue reading The Right Angle Upward
And you still tied to the buttery spread of a desert’s yellow light frustrated as your heel strikes sharp at the coarse-haired withers of your camel draped in Bedouin wool, stopping short, once again, to chew green shoots off a desert shrub. And me alone in a valley beneath this run of hills licking berryspread … Continue reading Spread Strawberries On A Sleeve
The boss who expects more of you, is a small mammal, facing up to a bigger world. The people you love, are small mammals, living on a small blue rock, floating through space. We are thousands of miles from where we started, and no idea as to where we are going. There are no adults, … Continue reading Small Mammals
I ate a can of sardines by the Gulf of Mexico— tin peeled back like a tongue. I felt envious eyes in every hinge of shell that would not close. My heels burrowed into the sand as if I, too, were something half-willing to be swallowed. The sea and land spoke over one another like … Continue reading Snack