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Citizens of a Great Country

November 7, 2017
It happens so quickly: pneumonia denationalizes us. Coughing and sickness and rashes recategorize us. We become, in the moment, the ill, not the Ecuadorians, The wounded, not the Dutch.  We are the afflicted, The balded, the debrided, the tested, the corridor-wheeled Where once we were Swedish and Belizian and Scots. A cough comes from the...

oil

November 7, 2017
In the field of horseheads and empty drums, neither was made of skin, so what was the oil for? My heart’s welling, I said. Give rope. Jackpump, then consume me, love. The thirsty birds had no feathers for wicking water. No feathers for camouflage or attraction or flight. We hot-blued the gun to protect it....

Self Portrait With Nightfall

November 7, 2017
Say you were born with a congenital absence, one You can see, a space you should have A digit or a limb to flutter and wave at The world, hang out on the air—or you’re missing Something invisible, a chemical in the brain that tells you Smile now, a piece of gristle your heart needs...

Cope Don't Mope

November 7, 2017
I took the first prank of the day and swam to it for calling me out. It readily blabbed. The body of it, below the neck, gone in the black water, its head all drunken humor, lopsided like the tail of a carrot. It told me that my problem today was I looked nothing like...

Survival Instict

November 7, 2017
There is something within us, and it is logical and unforeign but unnoticed. Even the animals sense it: the brainial stun that tells us what is pain, what is fear. But here, in the autumn forest, it is different. The moon is a mere suggestion—scribbled light on a depressed sky— and the fallen leaves are...

Portuguese Man o' War

November 2, 2017
Full sail, a feat of stylized rigging, armed frigate, eating machine whose armadas blow ashore through warming currents, to cooler coasts off Amagansett, up the Atlantic as far north as the Bay of Fundy, The Isle of Man—and I who envisioned your technicolor rays only in Our Amazing World’s slick pages, centerpiece of danger and...

History as Addendum and Night Terror (Acquisitio)

November 2, 2017
“We’ll cover up the cover-ups and move on.” —Robert Pollard I’m wearing my thin invitation on my already thin sleeve. The door prize is to peek into the cordoned- off crowd, to see the mourners or revelers or faint fingers tracing the secret sigil that keeps us all away. It is always this dream I...

Parable of the Sleepwalker

November 2, 2017
Forget him not. Somnambulant and blind treading the dark, his feet reading the braille of land: pebbles like old teeth and scales of bark loosened from swimming trees. He finds no ease. No, he finds no ease. A storm like a lantern swings above the leaves. He walks and walks. His mind tucked in another...

Kingdom

November 2, 2017
A pale day is ending but still you struggle in thousands of shades. The lacquered gold lion is a cobweb study on the windowsill and that there are far away ships gathering in your eyes means the tidal fact of the sea is ours, everything casting in and out insisting on the physical world, surged...

Local Mission

November 2, 2017
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of a vacant thought or daytime trance, brought on by the rain, or the peculiar way the leaves have suddenly moved on a nearby tree, or not moved, and have only seemed original, and severed from the dripping walls, the billboards advertising real estate agents, waterfront seafood restaurants,...

The New Bed

October 17, 2017
In the new bed, I swim in your hair while the sound of the highway laps at the windows. The moon, a quiet light, a fabled cave ocher. Your body tosses, rapt in some dream, over the dogs and the cat who watch the shadows track up and across the walls with disinterest. I can...

Loomings No Longer

October 17, 2017
I was all freshly aglimmer, wave-persuaded into a gold possibility. At first a marsh, a murkily-seeming surface. But magnified our practiced roles of shrinking turned up false. And strangely so— how the beacon of dreams we imagined could be so easily swept aside. Now it was his shadow of terror who shrunk. No, it was...