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 […]
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, […]