Every day putting a fresh spin on how he maintains that shit-eating grin despite his notoriously thin skin. The quagmire of what-might-have-been. Every day shouldering an invisible tray. Hello, hello. Olé, Olé. His musing on how best to waylay a hiker passing through a field of Galloways. Every day aiming to swat the single fly…
It is a warm winter mid-afternoon. We must understand what happened is happening. The colossus stands before us with its signature pre-emptivity. It glints. It illustrates. At my feet the shadow of the winter-dead bushes wave their windburnt stalks. Their leaves cast gem-cut ex- foliations on the patio-stone—bushfulls of shadow blossoming—& different-sized heads—& in them…
amputation. Above the knee. You r so cold. Winter light moves up your neck to yr lips. For the duration of this song to u mother the cold light moves from yr lips to yr new permanently shut eyes. You can’t rave any more, slapping fury over the countdown of minutes, u can’t force yr…
Why won’t you let me be glory, standing there in the mountainous half-bright shadow, fallen step-by-step down the staircase where a bad smell, urine and something else, unarguably an ultimate flaw, good to ignore years before but now not, not with you there above me, looking down, hardly clear, hard silent, except for cricks on…
i.m. Donald Rodney (18 May 1961 – 4 March 1998) Emblems of countless martyrs devoured by the Atlantic, who remembers that slavery was monarchical, that historical atrocity came directly from the divine head, that gravity cannot be numbered. Do not seek to be venerated or to win the appraisal of civic awe, like for instance…
All me sparks fly all night; all my mouth axle bright, wheel the true guillotine serpents’ fleck amber sweat off my waistline, sibilant as touch-me-nots’ shuttered leaves rattling Death in the Arena. Honey Blight and Armageddon. I am Thorn Tongue, bare sprite-child nerved against neon slush and ants trap, I squeal, bitten, “Mother O mother……
A young king, swashbuckling, expensively schooled in rhetoric and swordplay, with your gold-threaded tunic and plumed helmet fitted over your patrician nose: so you tossed bandits off cliffs and captured a bull—what do you know about war? Labor is for peasants, labor pains for women. But you waded among the suppurating dead on the fields…
—when angels fell out of the bookcase along with old newspapers, torn road maps from decades past, and a prize edition of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry : suddenly the catalogue tumbled. The painting, the show, Peter Blume’s Recollection of the Flood, the studio where I slept as a child those nights when…
If you hurt yourself before someone else hurts you, is that homeopathic? Watch me prick poison into my skin, sign my name in pain. Watch me miss the appointment, cancel the call. Watch me gulp smoke and receive a certificate of enlightenment between the smeared egg-yolk horizon to the west and the bone-white eastern sky:…
Carefully you balanced the old mattress against the box spring to create a teepee on that frozen December patch behind the house, carefully you stacked cardboard in the hollow and touched the match to corners till flame crawled along the edges in a rosy smudge before shooting twenty-five feet into darkening air. Fire gilded each…
A sickness came over me whose origins were never determined though it became more and more difficult to sustain the pretense of normalcy, of good health or joy in existence — Gradually I wanted only to be with those like myself; I sought them out as best I could which was no easy matter since…
General consensus in our home was candy or soda would kill us, or else rot our constitutions in some larger, metaphysical sense. Body & soul, to cite the old wisdom. In protest, my big sister & I would sneak the stuff through customs whenever we could: Swedish Fish & ginger beer, Kit-Kats, Mary Janes &…
