What do you want to be when you grow up? And the answers for a large pink boy were: fireman, policeman, truck driver. I wanted to be the papier-mâché bank I could never quite finish, to hold the vanishing treasureRead more…
When I was 20, I read a book
When I was 20, I read a book about chakras and imagined them as different car headlights hung inside my body their electrical connections dangling, like jellyfish, out my back, where no one could see. I had my arms aroundRead more…
up from the cracks
Life comes up from the cracks out of the asses of birds from flood and fire oaks soaked and blackened before they open one soft green finger to taste the world. Mustard bursts out of the bleak earth. If theRead more…
For the first time
for the first time with night falling with a dead thank-you on the ground, its feet still kicking my lips, it hits me like hot wind from the late train. I do have faith. Long-abandoned under hot classroom lights, pinnedRead more…
The Fox by Mary Oliver
All night under the pines The fox moves through the darkness With a mouth full of teeth and a reputation For death which it deserves. In the spicy Villages of the mice He is famous His nose in the grassRead more…
In Impossible Darkness by Kim Rosen
Do you know how the caterpillar turns? Do you remember what happens inside a cocoon? You liquefy. There in the thick black of your self-spun womb, void as the moon before waxing, you melt (as Christ did for three daysRead more…
The Chef
Cooking for many years but never achieving the notoriety he deserved, the chef branched out with difficult, exotic, foreign delicacies. This brought some small fame, and a flock of culinary thrill-seekers, who are always leaving. On his one day ofRead more…
What were you going to ask?
What were you going to ask me moments ago when I went to tell you that the tea was ready and I blurted into the suddenly-still room where your mother’s doilies have taken station and your roommate’s dusty floor projectRead more…
Caution is the left hand of darkness
Caution is the left hand of darkness, flashing, muted movie-house black where he slid naked fingers across vibrating leg hairs to touch the hot flesh inside my shorts. He who could not, would not, ride on my back at theRead more…
Enough dreadful nostalgia
Will the secrets of the body, the pleasure, the pain, move on like night ferries abandoned by modernity, like ghosts indistinguishable from the sea mist so that you can look back fondly and miss them? Isn’t there enough dreadful nostalgiaRead more…