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MY FUTURE-EX AND I SHARE A BAGUETTE.

November 7, 2023
around my bread-breaking wrist: a scapularmy future-ex got off her great-greats,or maybe her great-great-greats, and gaveto me, the well-meaning heathen.its delicate gold thread is rumpelstiltskinin reverse: decades-spun and sunnedback into yellow wheat. us two? indulgence bound.every seasoned kidnappee knowsto count signs: the left turns, the red lights,the mornings she strokes my ringfingerunderneath the table and...

the practice apartment

November 7, 2023
down on South Campus, catty-corner from the Bursar’s, overlooks the Solo cup perennials bloodying the Phi Delts’ house yard. Here: a practice baby (carried, born), first name [none], last name Domestic Economics (Domecon), on loan from the local orphanage. she’s parented in shifts, by semesters, as enrollment dictates. turnstile moms backlit by artless October suns...

Poem Featuring an Apocalypse 

November 7, 2023
Imagine snow, that cleantamping down that mutes colorand makes an art of moonlight. The end  of the world begins with a terrible noise,the breaking downof mechanisms and order, of protocol  and hierarchies. Sirensand skirmishes, the cracking of glass andbelow it all like a baseline,  weeping.Then the kind of quietyou find now only in graveyards or...

Poem I Would Send Into Space

November 7, 2023
Through a long childhood of visitsto planetaria, observatories, dark sky centersacross a scattering of citiesI refused somehowto retain the names and positionsof nearly any single bodyof that vast wondermentof nothingness and teeming light.I would drift into the projectedastral plane, dreaming alreadyamong the weightlessness and sparkle,wearing a cold veil of stardustand breathing the lost particlesof all...

Yard Work

November 7, 2023
The hawk is back, shewho gores mourning doveson the front stooppulling loose one bloody filamentat a time. Good mother,she nests each year highin a spiny pine from which the eyastest their downy wings.Not the neighbor’stilting, three-quarters-dead Ponderosathat will fall one of these gusty daysacross a nearby roof, smashing fencesand dragging down power lines, but on...

Mirror Bevel

October 19, 2023
My happiness is nearly done in the dishwasher, the drupels of water shrinking from shadows of fine white dust on its skin. It bathes above the smoldering element awaiting the song. It softens into the containment of its own false day. As a matter of routine the appliance repairman rings the doorbell before he knocks....

Cliché

October 19, 2023
One of the mountains did not sprout legs. As the others stood and shook the plates with their slow and stupendous steps, the legless mountain sat. See, from the roof, the stillness it possesses. Its neverthelessness, I mean. How ceaseless change invites itself upon the fact of durability. How, too, the opposite. Every morning my...

INFATUATION

October 10, 2023
It’s not in fashion to believe.So, you see my conundrum—my lacey, abused conundrum. Belief in a future “us” gets me out of bed,it makes me put the lotion on, walks mepast the intersection where we met, and later, in the shower, turns me flagellant. Infatuation for the wound’s sake.My fantasies have not matured much beyond...

In Front of the Round Wall

October 10, 2023
translated by Cindy Juyoung Ok If you post a letterit will come backIf you send lovecircling the earth roundyour loving wristswill be back soon andshatter under your feet If you fly a birdthe bird will fly awayget stuck to me andif you spend a lifetimeletting it flowriverwater will goand return again andif you spread your...

Glass

October 10, 2023
translated by Cindy Juyoung Ok On meyou leave no handprintsOver meyou hold no swaybutas if only all your shadows slippedOn meyou cannot even unload your weightNeither body temperaturenor whip reachesTo meeven your sweet voice does not reachThere are no hot tears eitherBut Iknow how to shatter at onceIn the morning sunlightten million strandstwinklingI know how...

I THINK OF THAT SOPRANOS EPISODE WHERE TIME IS A HORSE,

October 10, 2023
how Ralphie sets it on fire, tries to kill time, how even after it’s dragged away—all limp hooves & singed fur, chained bones beneath a burlap blanket—it snakes its way through the paddock dirt to Tony’s dream where he rides it backwards in his living room, tells Carmela he wants to come home & she...

MIGRATION

October 10, 2023
I want to write something about birds—Goldfinches or Blue Jays, flight patterns, how a love of acorns helped propagate oak trees after the Ice Age. Or, maybe, how Blue Jays aren’t really blue but brown, the blue— a reflection of scattering light on the surface of their feather barbs. And how no one knows why...