My mother’s letters are lost to me. I cannot read the language they are written in. My mother tries to teach me, long ago, turning our scarred kitchen table first into a desk, then into a jail. “Look here,” she says, “See how the word for heart is at the heart of the word for […]
Expecting, always, the resurrection, I made a study of wounds: the catgut stitch, the keloid itch; broke bones to watch them freshly bridge; read Gray’s and Ebers, lamplit, while my right hand charted tides. I toured the graves, clasped disinterred men close to gaze through their shocked eyes, seeking: a kite’s reflection, a last impression, […]
slip between the grating of my ribs, inside the pink jacket to clasp my heart just so, as you would a cicada’s glass husk, its flutter iron on your tongue. squeeze your fingers deep in every fold and cleft, feel its thunder press on your every whorl and line, and leave the negative print to […]
I. There is the before, the escape, being hurled into the rift gashing across spacetime the needlethorn layer pulled across skin. The words that are scrambled after your brain passes through the gap. There is the after. II. After the searing rush of information there is silence. Rooms blanketed in beige, a bed soft as […]
elders told me your face could be opened like persimmon cleaving apart at the fingertips, reddened as blood does, as bloodied fingers will do. inside, a round sphere unheld by any other parts of any other. seed of nothing else will do, root and salve of you, sweet and cracked; surviving all droughts, i keep […]
You wanted me to fly. Has it always been your fantasy? That my ungainly limbs would slip the noose of gravity and find some supple grace amidst the stars? That you could tuck my brain inside a jar, enfold my mind within the perfect plastics of a spaceship, shear away unruly flesh from interstellar dreams? […]
Sparse terrain. I took the drugs today. They’re a necessity, like my breathing tube. The drugs make everything clear. Still, there are mornings when I look at them: small, ovoid forms; oral pharmaceuticals. I roll them between my fingers, look out the window, see red dirt pile everywhere, see red dirt like my brain’s own […]
A soul is birthed sealed shut. Trembling, fragile membrane cocoons the glistening fluid, clear and rich with possibles: ichor mixed with tears. Gentle, now; surface tension. Clutch your shimmering, sea-jelly soul that caught sunlight in its depths somewhere. If it still remains unbroken, make a tear— just enough for the soul-stuff to trickle out into […]
the sun is drowning in my throat burning her way down and leaving in her wake bright welts and brief splashes of milk-white scar tissue strained through with saturnalian blues, violet, bitter carmine and sunrise flush of searing hydrogen, all mapped out by your curious hands, teeth, tongue, your bitten lips tools of cosmography my […]