The rain has come to ionize the alien frontier, calling out storms over a smeared earth. We sit in varying stages of anesthesia staring at the long sky, the secondhand measured in lives. We disciple new religions with the sun and the moon. We abandon them as they dismay. We survey the rim of heaven with our elastic eyes. Rivers of rock cramp down the divine slide. A world of slants and angles, temples and monuments. Here are the pyramids of America. Hard love flowers in the stoic ground, mixed blood pushes up strange vineyards among ancient runways. Here we…

  Before enlightenment chop wood carry water. After enlightenment chop wood carry water. ~ Zen Kōan    My father’s mother churned the deep litter with her bare hands. Her gnarled knuckles pounded the earth or shooed away clay pebbles as she expertly swooshed gnats with a puff of air out the side of her mouth. Her humming of hymns haltered with the occasional fuck!—five seconds between f and k—when bitten by a fire ant. Her Southern drawl translated the four-letter curse into a lengthy abysmal revelation yet Granny Carrie seemed immune to the sting never breaking rhythm with her hands.…

Which reminded me of those middle school dances when we would slow dance to “Under the Bridge” the end-of-the-dance song, the finale the last chance to be close to your crush or watch your crush dancing with someone else under taped up streamers or maybe balloons for Valentine’s Day that turned from blood-red to bruise-purple in the swaying darkness. Or maybe there weren’t decorations at all just that tired PA system and the CDs we brought from home. Someone’s older brother would play DJ press play and watch the bodies rock methodically in the deep echo next to each other…

My hips are tectonic plates shifting. A heart-shaped bone.  In the seams: a spiral vine roots, Fibonacci unravels into feral cliff road. serpentine spine carved from stone I’m strong like the weed is stubborn. Not beautiful but alive. Bent back to an approximation of flower. Reaching. Still. The most scenic roads curve madly, a sweeping dare. Don’t think, drive, don’t die—trace your hands along this map this improper bony land.  each vertebrae a trail leading further in Sky, asphalt, rock, sea smash together, break apart. Skin covers bent bone this grand costume, hair, makeup: splendor          …

  Fin A small mountain rises from the swell beyond the bow. Grey-black, sleek sheet metal, ready to be scrapped for parts. The hammerhead is hauled onto the deck. A silver hook of fear, pulsing, panicked, twisting like an exposed muscle. Pinned down, she is shorn of her angles, pared to a slender carcass, eel, submarine, then tossed overboard like a surplus torpedo. On the dock, a thousand triangles are laid out to shrivel, a distant sun squeezing them dry. The rest hang from apartment balconies like bunting. At market, the fins are amber flags, half-mast. Layered across the stalls…