I’m angry for my brother’s television set with its lumpy men. He is supposed to be excited for my visit. He likes his rehab friends, two of them play chess under the ping pong table, feet sticking out arbitrarily. I … Read More
Amore e Mona Lagia e Guido ed io Possiam be ringraziare un Ser costui Che n’ha partiti, sapete da cui? Nol vo’ contrar per averlo in oblio. Poi questi tre più non v’hanno disìo; Ch’eran serventi di tal guisa in … Read More
Bill O’Reilly is obsessed with how long it takes a murder victim to die. In his novel – that’s right, his novel – we find out, for example, that “the soft tissue gave way quickly and the steel penetrated the correspondent’s brain stem. Ron Costello was clinically dead in four seconds.” Or, “Lance Worthington couldn’t feel the razor-sharp box-cutter blade slice through his throat…. it was exactly two seconds before he lost consciousness.” Some deaths come even quicker: “A slab of sizzling white hot metal fell directly on his head. Death for Shannon Michaels came one second later.”
A French damsel and I decided to take a train To New York to see the Gates and be at play. You were late to the Dinky and had to book It to meet me by the stop to pause, … Read More
At dawn she sneaks blood oranges From the grange- Land, and the seeded pulp and the climbing (where the farmers’ fence is Rough) have painted orange- Red her picking arm. For several Mornings now I’ve seen her range Her pickings … Read More
We were sixteen when they evacuated the gymnasium in the middle of the English exam (anonymous bomb threat, year after Columbine). I was writing on Roethke – not the poem we’d read in class and most everyone agreed told the … Read More
In the French, tu me manques – you are missing to me. You are missing to me, to my body, to my arms which starve on air, to my eyes which dream up the shape of you in everything. You … Read More
Sig loves me. He’s sitting at the counter, eating a bagel right now, but I know he’s thinking about me. Today, like every Sunday, he sits all day here in this café where I work. A man across the coffee … Read More
Tilty Gringot frowns at the fresh face of the morning and draws shut the curtains. He is an ambler and a shuffler, Tilty, and as he walks from the window to the kitchen small flurries of dust obscure his feet … Read More
Those pills, those—what were they?—those pills we ate are going crazy. My limbs are, like, exploding off me. I feel great. You look very pretty now. I mean, I feel great! How do you, how do you feel? Not going … Read More
Coming up a stairwell, I stop. A custodian, a man holding a feather duster, has also stopped at the midway landing to let two women pass. They descend to the landing, past the man and the duster, then past me, … Read More
1 Black night sky pierced by bursting bubbles of color. Brilliance rains down on the back patio, singing blood-red bricks. Flames—leaping, dancing, hoping to escape—curl around the logs in the semi-lunar pit. Vigilant mothers reprimand squabbling children, “Don’t you dare … Read More