In my dream all the women were there because it was a women’s college some of them had attended and we were seated around a wooden table. I was brought a fish, silverscaled: a salmon, I believe. I fed it a goldfish. —Now your fish is pregnant, they told me —you must carry it everywhere. […]
It was a knife, that first time we noticed, the old one that fitted so well to my hand. These things happen, you said, thinking it merely lost. I worried the landlord’s kid broke in, took it for kicks. My glasses, two weeks later, the only thing they gave back. All day we searched […]
A stranger’s shirt on my back, sweat-sour, I weave a tangled arithmetic through a sea of ink to pawn off dented yellow helm and a pair of blue-stained sleeves for an onigiri. On the polished arcade floor leaning against a shuttered Westwood you are shamefully out of fashion, on the borderlands of expiry, and […]
On the one hand, they had been her friends for so long, whispering in her ears, telling her stories, reciting poems, not just the sorts of things you would expect, Sappho and Hesiod, but Auden, Eliot, Yeats—they liked the modernists— and Sylvia Plath, Adrianne Rich— they were eclectic in their tastes. Sometimes they had sung […]
A paper can be folded seven times. Each crease across my origami skin is sharp enough to slice. I’ve tried to thin my bones and sinews, ink myself in lines so small, so shrinking, safe to overlook— passed between palms, a secret note in school, crumpled and cast into a fire as fuel, […]
on a glass pond the silver swan dips its head and swallows tiny iron fish quick, jerking gulps someone carved each feather with forgotten techniques and the bird winds down over decades, gears growing blunt-edged and bent I put you on a pedestal where no rust could touch nor […]
Who do we think we’re kidding? As if the threshold was the infinitesimal, too— but spirit does linger. Bring honey, a black lamb, two firearms, and a woman’s dress, with the turning of the moon. Soon, I will turn thirty. Hope for the best. Hunting is my living, see, and I take away from this […]
Not ever to be born surely was the better choice! By cruel fate we’re torn. We lack a voice in our dreadful ends; we forever know and forever show the gods aren’t friends to any living thing…! Yet, though washed by sea, we also can’t be free of the constant sting, the deepest, […]
It’s complex, this idea of sorrow, this love of my son who is my husband, this one foot after another. Tomorrow is now, yesterday is when, never today. Moments wash away in morning’s mourning. Our children will know the shame of it, the blame of it, but the noose will not. It will work morning, […]