Sink into your parents’ plastic pool, painted mosaics on polypropylene liner, PVC flamingo floats, neon orange rafts turn your skin whiter (exsanguinate eyelids, cheekbones keen), cherry stone freckles sit– mistaken unsinkable seeds. For all of the Sylvias shivering away ventricle remnants of nostrum– (remember when you went around the world?) please don’t end here. Come out from under– water,…
Have you ever seen the sun set through the grip of a palm frond? The way tangerine and lavender cuts through the leaves? The way the leaves cut through flesh if pressed? A young frond emerges folded, the area called the cabbage. The city skyline is littered with sharp cabbages tilting their heads. I once saw an overgrown palm drop …
the game got played on heart-gazing nights dreaming this body transposed among las estrellas otras & how much brighter they sound in that disinherited cosmos still looking ever up, seeking constellation coordinates where this vessel might collapse distances built between each tip of an asking tongue: when can i say encontré mi lugar cosmica? cuantos sueños will it take? Jason…
And then came the rain and you wondered if that was a light at the end of the tunnel? Or was it just an expiring cruise missile on the Left Bank of the Dnieper River. In the corner of your eye an antimissile aircraft immediately intercepted it, you merely blink your awe away. Meanwhile, the honeysuckle blooms profusely this…
I wonder where’d all this water come from? Even though you complain about my oily hair, the dirt beneath my nails, you still hate the water bill the most and I don’t blame you I blame the rivers we’re stealing from Because they’re all speaking French and seductively tongues the syllables of suburban homes for soil and call it Gardening…
The story goes that Cain was too selfish to sacrifice one of his oxen and that was why he offered crops instead, built a pyre of apples and wheat sheaves pumpkins and ears of corn. Or maybe it was some other vegetable or fruit unknown to us cultivated out of existence due to its phallic shape or unpleasant smell. Perhaps…
Scattering the Ashes Late, late at night, he searches for her birth certificate, for their marriage license, for snapshots of the two of them, together. Morning begins with daylight splayed across the surface of the frozen pond behind their house. It is late February 2022 and still this winter threatens. Oak leaves, brown and sere, hang from limbs like cast-off…
White Space Tell me about these white spaces you write y o u r s e l f i n t o. They look so clean on the page. Does it feel free? Giving words bounteous space around …
Girding Up The coat still fit. The arms, the chest, all of it in brown corduroy. And his wool stocking hat. Also out of vogue, that he’d thought he lost, he now pulls over his ears.…
You Ask Me Where It Comes From It comes from anywhere and everywhere. It’s the irritant that starts the nacre’s flow within the shell, the thing that captures your attention and won’t let go. Somewhere in the back of your brain as you go about common duties: washing dishes, folding laundry, it begins to form until you pry your mind open with a…