When the TV arrived the Directors portended no blinking. Still, I am trying to shut my eyes— unhook the little sinewed hooks— The nose pressed to the cornea’s dream, all Technicolor, is ingrown. The head sticks— The wires are fixed, are done / me in-
Absence is the finest thing— subtracting — one from one — makes a sum without a witness. If it isn’t in the equation it was never in the room. Implied when it is built in. The empty chair denoting gone, the table goning still —
A hideaway can sometimes be a person. When I was in high school I needed a place to hide from my bony knees, my blistered face, so I crept into a girl who laughed loud and stole charm bracelets from Claire’s and drove her Taurus
Starving, we eat. By the end, morsels of dried rice cling to our shirts. One bowl holds our sour soup to feed four people. The ash, from the chopped tree bark, consumes us. The liquid gasoline is funneled into plastic bottles, then placed into the
How difficult it is to say what’s here, in April’s drownings. Try. The bayou, drenched in blinded eyes, twice opened, once fighting with steam of murk rising beneath scum and mosquito eggs, decay warring with the soil-soaked water regimented with weekly fertilization, grown with cannibalization
in this post-Ratt paradigm, my ends are not out for the tie that binds. my personal brand is a buzzard losing its balance on a megachurch billboard, and then forgetting to fly; grownup scene-kids do not whisper “he gets things done.” I’m daydreaming of marrying
My first photograph finds me squinting into the light, RESEARCH MEDICAL CENTER 1987 printed on my T-shirt, the fingers of my right hand raised to my temple like a psychic who is trying to get a reading on an audience member. I frown in concentration
Puerto Maldonado, Peru 2003 There are more stars in the southern hemisphere, I’m convinced. All the grand small things of the night hum and whir with life, a bat streaks past my blind face and the river swells after nine hours of rain. Javier raises
Between a bay and a beach, a gale built from gray to gray: an evident, flatiron figure. Eastern, experimental frames, carrying a conventional crew of chance, developed during dead-rise displacement, furling forward, from a frolic to an extraordinary, almost forgotten example of exaggeration. Courtesy adrift,
for Anna-Lisa Hillenburg The kestrel clutched our ranger’s padded fist, its rust-streaked cheeks jerking quizzically from girl to girl. We listened drowsily in mist before the thunder broke, before we leaned beneath that tiny canopy to keep at least our shirtfronts dry. ‘Imprinted’ means she