perhaps we could find ourselves ritualistically shifting our bodies alongside the banks of Lake Michigan colored the blackest blue I've ever known. perhaps your hand will find mine in darkness and the tense leaves will release a sound under the footsteps of our own solemn smiling dances as I look into your darting eyes the … Continue reading Nobody Has Time For Art, But We Make Art Anyways
You had no right to be the first to die. I was the older. You should not have rushed ahead of me. You knew the days were counting down when I called and you said, “I’m chilled, need my sweater, call you back.” And didn’t. I waited two more empty days, all the things I … Continue reading Sisters
My mind is still as a stone, so now, just to be on the safe side, I’m launching into a couple of quick rounds of practice sleep. You never know when you’re going to come up empty handed. Naturally, ice is a slippery thing, especially during foxhole season, so don’t wait a minute longer to … Continue reading The Red Boat
Once, when I was a child, my family dog picked up a kitten in its mouth, punctured a hole in its neck and it choked on its own blood. I think I cried for weeks. I think I tried to pry the dog’s jaws open. I think I came running into the kitchen, limp corpse … Continue reading A Conversation With My Therapist
You thought someone was living inside the walls, laughing at you. Staring at you. Talking about you. You tore at your face until craters bled. Kept telling me something was hiding underneath your skin, crawling with fleas. When I woke up, found your side of the bed empty/cold, I thought I would discover your body … Continue reading Alex, The Addict
Puddles reflect the sun’s glare, the rising chorus of songbirds emerge into a morning in which pine boughs and maple branches hang free without the weight of snow. Along the path: a child’s mitten, the cellophane of a cigarette pack, an empty pint of cheap whiskey, a plastic grocery sack that rolled like tumbleweed during … Continue reading After The Snowmelt
A place pressed anonymously in a small gilt frame — an un-housed painting, like the artist’s still brush, or the stark canvas, too naked, too white. The hand’s left grasping for leaves from last year’s garden — where faint ideas, and the pause between gestures, remain like a van Gogh still-life. The storybook window is … Continue reading Painting Abstractions
Like a 10-year-old with illegal fireworks, I got the Dr Freud app. Now, I’m lying on my living room couch, while the dogs hang around, wagging. Of course, the past isn’t what it used to be. I’m hungry all the time, and I have no idea why all the antimatter disappeared. Maybe I should be … Continue reading Late
I wonder what it would feel like to jump Out of this moving vehicle. To just keep rolling As the train disappears, just the smell of it left behind Like gin mixed with sulfuric acid. And I, Still spinning furiously, a tumbling gymnast Balled up into the forest. Muddied limbs — batons Punching the earth … Continue reading Rolling Out From Moving Vehicles
empty beer bottles and empty banana skins. an open, half-empty and half-stale sliced pan. used plates and take- away boxes. nothing with lipstick stains. books on the table. a coffee pot, inside turned yellowing brown like the pits of a ten- year-old t-shirt. — DS MAOLALAI DS Maolalai has been nominated nine times for Best of … Continue reading The Kitchen While You’re Gone