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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
You didn’t think I was capable of grace like this against your bull horn temper breaking china. But I learned to swallow your sound like a wide mouth cave brimming with bats. There’s a tightening around the gussets of your performed tenderness when you ask me to lean forward. I feel three fingers marking the […]
All the stars are closer now than they have ever been. If you were still beside me you’d reach up on tiptoes, fingers spread to touch the brightest one. But you’re not here, gone deep below for far too long to ever let me think you’re coming back. If you could open up your eyes […]
My skin peels in oozing scales: tar, cinnamon, H2O, ferrum, CO2, reverberation of how dare you show yourself in public, hide it under wraps! it must smell when whole galaxies fall scraped off, blood into void, covering all in volcanic ash unseemly to talk about skin flare spreading to my fingers, growing spaceships out of the debris […]
For Ada Hoffman 1 No one ever expects a dinosaur. 2 Especially not on a small town street— pounding the pavement with deadly clawed feet. 3 From beneath one of those feet, painful groans. Those nearby shrieked, but then stifled their moans. They knew what to do. They pulled out cell phones. 4 Could social […]