all they’ve said about the painting is a lie‚ except my being a sphinx of beauty. to think they’d ever call me a vampire feels unbelievable‚ until you remember that I’ve been dead more times than I’ve been alive. the truth remains, my eyelashes had been plucked and fed to fishes. the untold story goes, […]
The day I collected my soul, the cranberries lost their innocence, twining on my doorknob in a search for something sweet. It was nearly sunset, and the mole people scuttled underground with badges and tales of espionage, the orchards dripping with caterpillars. Dark clouds almost sang my feet to sleep when a splitting echo poured […]
Musigisg ewniaq, the sky is turning blue: aurorae humming electric dreaming among the clouds. Milamu’gl jugo’tui: Bring me the different colors of a murmuration of strange birds taking to air when dawn arrives. Paqtasultieg, We are shining bright in the three suns of a new stratosphere, watching limb reach to limb in the […]
Galatians 6:11 see what inkjet I make of my deft paws, concealing a switchblade—cupid hung, to serve as restraint when I word overboard with love. my long breath, drawing the heat for print. the jammed teeth of wastepaper. I fill the cartridge that is my guts, sum all saliva to one thick […]
But who would pray to you, supply your canonization? First, all is muted, a green, speckled wash, and a balding man has just heard the worst news of his life, and your name comes to him as gently as a silver blanket placed on the face of a planetless child, the cry for help […]
I spent years pulling my heart out from behind my ribs, certain that I didn’t need it, that barking mess, making all that noise— I threw it to the wolves, took their offering of teeth, thinking I could rid myself of the whole aching creature— but it kept coming back, loyal and broken, a resilient […]
there’s only so much metal on earth—another way to phrase this: how often will I be expected to wake up with plundered copper coils on my tongue? a decommissioned satellite in my chest? there are humane methods of extraction: ex. putting me back to sleep & forbidding my aimless swallowing of every potentially valuable […]
you open the papers, wipe the headline-stains on the back of your knee, grumble that the world has changed since you were young. elder, all it did was become high definition. it turned your window into a pathway, and you don’t like standing in its light. there are so many trees you don’t […]
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 […]