Close




THE SUBJECT DOES NOT BELONG 

February 17, 2025
“… to the world but it is a limit of the world.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus How flesh is the conduit for powerAs in deep waters    into the hourI plunge     Strawberry-pulpedteeth   You taste sweet       Cravendoes the fox saunter   scarlet intohemlock’s porcelain beyond the window    In  the language of tongues      I sunbendI weatherwith   I...

i get 100% masochist on that internet BDSM test

February 17, 2025
listen. bruising is god turning the water in me into wine.  listen I don’t do things halfway. listen the psychic damage didn’t leave a mark. listen when I do it to myself it’s a “cause for alarm”. listen no one listened. listen if you hurt me at least you want me. listen sometimes we just like the sting of a slap. listen maybe I do it...

I Walk Across Campus Toward Prothro Hall Where I Will Give a Lecture on Prosopopoeia in Contemporary Elegy to Mostly Finance Majors 

February 17, 2025
The fountain performs its little partytrick, spraying itself here and there,twisting a litter of beer cans in small pirouettes across its pool. Under a bench,flies in pursuit of a nest swarm a banana peel. It doesn’t take much, I say to no one, to accept your owncaptivity. In the lawn, the AlphaGamma girls, ever innovative, use their textbooks as tanning mirrorsand the...

Married Two Years, the Husband, Troubled, Brings Up Our Sex Life 

February 17, 2025
At dawn, people  whose stomachs have gone soft  with age walk their dogs. A few  jog. The mourning doves talk   to each other the way they do,  like they’re calling out to God  from underwater. This is the time  of day I feel at all  like myself: quiet, unfettered, almost   autonomous, looking out  the front window, taking inventory  of my small plot of universe, a universe  that has scheduled for...

Dead to Rights at the Bureau of Life 

February 17, 2025
God parted the gray  clouds of heaven  to decree  “None shall pass  before me  before thy time…Take a number  and kindly  wait at  the back  of the  line.”  It was  getting hotter,  like somewhere  south of south a boil started to  boil, the skin of  the earth bulged, sometimes belched.  Suicide violated policy, but the...

The Bureau of Exchange 

February 17, 2025
Someone figured out a way to live forever, but it was costly, a complex matter of accounting.   You  burned  an  hour off your  life   in  a  cigarette’s minute,  but got  a half-second  rebate for each kilometer paced on smoke break.   Subtracting  speed’s  saved time,   car-reliance  taxed  the average  American  a  decade—The same quantity...

Nobody’s Bureau 

February 17, 2025
after Emily Dickinson The Blame Machine  is on the fritz  again.  Thankfully, nobody’s  to blame.  Sure took a long time tofigure out,  though—nobody’s dying from an abundance of praise.  The funeral’s  planned for  nextFriday. Nobody knows how to feel. Nobody looks death in its hard, white face and jabs it in the eye.Nobody dies all...

It’s the stage of grief where 

February 17, 2025
I become attached to a loaf of bread that (in low light) almost looks like a baby. Welcome, little one! I know my rights,  so I can’t be denied my own miracle  in a land where people idolize  the face of the Virgin on toast.   At the Y with Baby Pumpernickel,  I sign us up for Mommy &...

Praise Economy

February 17, 2025
A lady tells me she loves my black down skirt and I say I love your coat! And I do! Cheyney says this kind  of backatcha, babe! response is too easy, undoes the kindness. Some German told him you should just  take it, say thanks, or you’re screwing it up. I tell him No,  Italians say Grazie VUOI, or No,...

Living for Something Other Than Your Name on My Phone

February 17, 2025
Lucy dying fabric yellow on our stovetop with turmeric root. How in a packed film screening, Icould tell which laugh was Mabel’s. My godmother reviving the swiss cheese vine I killed last May. Sarah reading love poems on the beach in California. My father dedicating an old-growthforest in Ohio. Molly, high in Minnesota, crying for...

First Light

February 17, 2025
After the apocalypse, we drove through the night to the edges of Acadia. Sat in the car as acorns   rained down, as the wind shivered around us.  As the ancient cities of deer and vole, of field mouse  and foxglove sat patient around the car. And when the light came, first as tender blades   then as a full-blown...

Origin of a Mountain

February 4, 2025
My grandmother used to tell me a story  that her great-grandmother told:  The origin of a mountain is a stone’s prayer to the wind: please erode everything but me. Time lifts the mountain.  And when rocks rumble down the leeward side,  it is the wind who begs to be seen.