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Waltzball

October 17, 2017
There are too many parties sometimes and you want to say no, no, I don’t feel like making merry tonight. Everybody’s coming on like their lives depend on it, like getting someone to come home with them tonight is the cure to cancer. The snowsmell in the air is a cure for foggy notions. Everything...

Outside View of the Victory Festivities

October 17, 2017
Each mouth in the crowd launches a fighter jet. Every confetti flutter represents as much potential energy as an artillery shell made good. More stars than on all the souvenir flags, more parts to a salute than anyone knows. Overturned and burning cars believe in team. The lottery chooses what boys become exiles next. Place...

The Spinning Place

October 17, 2017
Mars rotates on its axis, completing one revolution every 24.6 hours. —NASA Think of something you wish we had a word for, I tell my students. If our experience flows through the current of language, then how do we live what we cannot say? What would you say if you could? A student says, a...

Light, A Disturbance

October 17, 2017
What our senses perceive as empty space is actually the home of invisible electric and magnetic fields giving birth to self-reproducing disturbances that travel at the speed of light. …these disturbances are what light is. —Frank Wilczek No clouds, as if blue were all the sky could summon. And in that blue, an infinite sheet...

When I Was Baptized in Missouri Dirt

October 17, 2017
It stayed that same, steady surrender of color even dug up and turned over, covering the shovel in it, somehow never quite sloughing off, even as dry as it got, and as hot. So I like to look back at that one rain that ran right into the hour when our garden had to be...

cell

October 17, 2017
They think, as greennesses think, of freezing, and of the gowns of dawn that churn, dissolve. They think of a man like a heart, silver in a holocaust Sunday, botanical in a limbo like flesh. Daylights magnify the eyeglass glisten, they think, as they listen, of libraries of green, that one spring when the burn...

It Was One of Kitty's Happy Days

October 17, 2017
How Anna could wear anything but black is beyond girlhood, if girlhood is a trading-in of lilac for black’s potential energy. Kitty with her eloquent ribbon just so sees Anna in black and thinks of what she could not otherwise—migrations of a man’s heart. We, hungry readers, understand Kitty as a budding thing, succeeding so...

A Moment Without Objects

October 17, 2017
Suddenly I felt I had to prove something and I went from cupboard to bed stand, to coffee mug and desk to find what I thought had been missing from my life as though I could find it where I had spent most of my hours. I sharpened a pencil, I plucked a guitar string,...

My Delinquency

October 17, 2017
Having to be so without having to be so, I take my seat at the bar. It’s my manner. I’m willful. Absent. Crisp. And cold. I know where to point my eyes when speaking, when listening, when the check arrives. I’m having lunch today because I’m pretty civilized. When I ride the train, I curve...

Seconds Before Landing

July 21, 2017
Would you take a look at that? The ground rising below your knees and cuffs and shoes to meet you as it must and is its business. And how the various things now coming into focus calling out to you tree branches, street lamps, is that a parking lot, a bird from your bird’s eye...

Swamp Apocalypse

July 21, 2017
Though I live in the land of 10,000 lakes, I’m already planning how I’ll thrive once Nestlé’s bought us out. The trickle through my swamp side plot is full of beaver scat, but where they took the popple out, oaks dug in and kept the sun from sucking dry the scrub. We’re not above eating...

Occidentalism

July 21, 2017
A man celebrates erstwhile conquests, his book locked in a silo, still in print. I scribble, make Sharpie lines, deface its text like it defaces me. Outside, grain fields whisper. Marble lions are silent yet silver-tongued, with excellent teeth. In this life I have worshipped so many lies. Then I workshop them, make them better....