Backyard prayer
cicada heartbeat buzzing in my chest breathing hot air into hot air sweat beading on my shoulders like fireworks at night how do you get back a mulberry bush hanging over a lake feeding the snapping turtle with soft mouthfuls your mother flipping pancakes each Saturday morning —warm paws reaching towards your belly— to me […]
I’ve always been good at true love
if i remember correctly you tasted like black cherries dark blood in your teeth spitting pits in the soft grass of summer blowing on a fire making ashes fly, embers burn if i remember correctly we lay facing the sky watching the evening bats fly closer and closer more frantic than the rhythmic birds […]
Postscript to an Unsent Letter
Anyway, all that aside (aside, like those massive mounds of old snow plowed into piles on street corners, at dead ends)— it is February. Hinting of change. Today the sun shed its gray, ragged-edged petticoats, light dances raw in the street again, windows flash back. From tired fruitless branches impertinent finches inquire about the possibility […]
The Astronaut’s Mysterious Renunciation of the Rock-solid
After floating so long in the limitless— up and down replaced by out there— he returns to earth, settles deep in the heart of Texas. Surrenders his protective polymer suit. Released from precise routine amid clean-clicking solid-state components, he lands there untethered, and turns to running a down-to-earth business: his fleet of trucks deliver […]
You’ll Get There
and the anchovies will unleash their hooves and the platypus will die trying but you’ll be there and beat the odds like Mahler at 7:32 AM or bottles of beer that are green with listening and waiting stomachs like molasses and gratitude like horny thoroughbreds gallant coffins empty those streets unfurl, feel saintly dirty and […]
Burning Juniper
Circa whenever and awhile. The year zero in the month of never, you and I on a five-year plan, up to our chins in slow motions and quicksand, good witches burning juniper, warding off evil, summoning sprites to act our bidding, deliverance almost a moment from here, our hopes and wishes a shimmering mirage in […]
Euthanasia
You fell asleep in a space I cannot reach, a syntax of skin reworked to chalk. The needle slips, unthreads your knot: you’ve breathed me out cordage pooling between my fingers, incomplete. I pour libation, stale and old, sit in the dark, worship your final moments. I see it now as the peace of volcanic […]
Graciela Among the Seri
In 1970, after the death of her six-year-old daughter, Graciela Iturbide found herself in photography. In 1978, she visited the indigenous Seri people, a small clan who live on the Sonoran coast, who have survived attempts by Spanish conquistadors and then Mexican federales to uproot them, who speak an isolated language, who keep no written […]
The Go-Between
—After Lady Writing a Letter with Maid. Johannes Vermeer. 1670 How eagerly my Lady bade me to her room, fussing at my apron till I produced the note. Still warm from running, I saw the flush rise from breast to throat as she broke the seal and read at such speed as made her breathless. […]