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Duplex: Rupture

August 26, 2025
Mother begins a redundant apology, her dystonia-bound tongue fog-laced & sloppy. I lay down my body beside her, two empty rinds registered for second-hand lives. I dream of laying down my body beside her, two empty rinds in second-hand lives. Mother is a ghost-written version of her mother, a haphazard cut and then paste. I...

October

August 26, 2025
It is an easy leap between words. On my dog walk, drying  hydrangeas on every other stoop.   Drying hydrangeas where there  were only hydrangeas yesterday.  When I use these words   aloud, they become dying, derangement.  Dying, derangement. An easy leap  over the stone wall between   a word and the sound it makes. Dying hydrangeas on every other stoop. Death and arrangement.   It is...

Romance in a Capitalist Age

August 26, 2025
I was skinny as a stick,with a lick like a whip,with a tongue like a fist,with a pistol for my wrongs.I remember being surly.Now I am sure. Nowmy fuse is short. NowI am shot through withthe swagger it takes topush ajar the doors ofa saloon, flick pricelessvases from their stands,with the bitternessit takes to tell...

Just Before Bed

August 26, 2025
You asked me who I was and I was afraid  to say so, as if my name was a fence around me  only recently overgrown. Like my name was up  there fixing a weathervane in a thunderstorm.  Or like it was trying to bury a dead animal at night  with the ground already froze. As if my name was  the exact...

Our Shakespearean Heaven

August 26, 2025
For the amount of time horses spend in introspection  you’d think they’d make better art. Not that I haven’t  seen a few uncannily abstract expressionist hoofprints   or some like the letter C printed on top of itself offset  enough to suggest one of them is the other’s shadow—  though in this black ink who’s to...

Keep Talking, Don’t Let These Killers Forget You’re Human

August 26, 2025
Their eyes are white balloons half-full of milk,their hearts are plastic frogs with dead batterieswhere their ribbits were but you have totell them in their ears / rightin their ears / those burning paper funnelsyou have to never let them forget you are human / their leveris a pool noodle taped to a tv remote...

Rumination

August 26, 2025
If I stopped for a moment even, even  for a moment, I would not start again ––   like breathing –– no, I fear, I should say, fear ––  I fear I would not start again –– and it is fear  that keeps me up, suspended like an apple  in my mind when someone tells me to picture  it: an apple...

You’re Human, Keep Talking, Don’t Let These Killers Forget 

August 26, 2025
they can push a body off of a helicopter / watch it crash into the sea you have to tell them / they are that body  even as they eat cookies at you YES AT YOU these killers  are worried you are taking from them  something / they sure wish they could put their fingers on/in/through tell them  about your father...

Let These Killers Keep Talking, Don’t Forget You’re Human 

August 26, 2025
but then tell them so it shows them / don’t let them forget  they are nowhere / they have problems that are about   sitting down and decaying they have too many holes  in their grabbers and too many grabbers  in their boredom / you should keep talking through them talking / like rain you should tell them  secrets of mountains you...

Field Notes with Cat

August 26, 2025
As a ribcage accepts      the sunlight dripping             through it, my cat staggers into the room. He can         no longer wash his eyes             with his shell-pink tongue & drools continuously into his gleaming fur.             His silver such       that whole photo albums exist dedicated to its luster. My mother told me              to write happily, to be        happily writing. Sontag assures me...

Eat the Rich 

August 26, 2025
They say Eat the Rich and hand you a spoon so tiny it can hold a single black pearl; so large, it can devour you like a toothless monster that’s all shaft and no stomach. They say eat your heart out and what they really mean is to let your envy devour  your guilt, annihilate...

Spaceship Earth

August 26, 2025
Surprisingly, the answers lie in our past.—Judi Dench, Spaceship Earth, 2007-Present Here, in this hostile world, the mammoth keeps dying. Every fifteen minutes,our ancestors leave the cave to re-spear the wounds they’ve already made.A scribe never finishes chiseling the ibis while their pharaoh mid-diatribeturns to me, one of another million fathers in the tired dark...