Here I am, the understove-listener, the ancestral keeper of an indefinite gender and infinite hairiness who lives under your kitchen threshold, under your fridge, making your ice cubes perfectly square when you deign to pour yourself a drink: minimalist living requires an absence. I protect you while you sleep—but you want to wake up in […]
Do you remember the hands of men? How they pressed into your skin until red blossomed across the surface? How their intentions left patterns on your body? When you fled through fields, through forests, up mountains, up hills, into streams, into […]
She wraps herself in the sparkling sky A black sari of sleekest night Ageless maiden clothed in mortal form In her chest beats a mirror pool Rippling with regret Solitude lived in shadow stings, it says Sip your grief, sip your grief The stars in her sky-silk Are heavier than salt Gleaming, ringing in each […]
you should fly fragile bones and your heart beat beat beat your gilded cage cannot hold you the stars call your name and the nebulas are your skies the Pleiades your home somewhere, they meet, hand in hand, the bridge of your kin a red wedding string joining generation after generation you should fly fragile […]
It will probably not be home for supper anytime soon. Things will get broken and not put back together again. When you speak to it about paying its fair share of the rent, it will start at you with that far-away look, or as though it is squinting at things too small for you to […]
The witch said, “I will give you what you want. All you have to do is wear through seven pairs of shoes.” “Which shoes?” she asked. “Oh, any. But the number is important.” The first pair, she was wearing that day in the woods: red Keds. In them, she would ride her bike down the […]
It looks like a door, but it isn’t. It just wears the shape of it, like a wolf greasing itself in sheep fat. Here is what it isn’t—an ending or beginning, a snail of a fist or a palm-up platform waiting for a virgin’s deer-quick heart, a spindle upon which to spin out the yarn […]
Eric Blair coughed out his last red breath in 1950, but George Orwell goes stumbling on through the nightlands of America, a dead man’s pub crawl trying to drown the rhythm of a stamping boot and the claque’s counterpoint applause in microbrewery bitters and too much Bud. The White House says the truth is one […]
for Rachelle Wright No one asked the axolotl “Would you like to leave the warm peridot waters of Lake Xochimilco? Would you trade the fertile chinampas for an aquarium and floodlight scrutiny in our research labs?” Maybe if we’d asked the axolotl he’d have said, “¡Órale!” Morphing back to doggish deity Xolotl he might have […]
Ten things were created on the eve of Shabbat, between the lights of night and day, and they are: the mouth of the earth, the mouth of the well, the mouth of the donkey, the rainbow and the manna, and the staff, and the shamir, the writing, the missive and the tablets. And the world […]