The harvest moon is six hours late and I can’t catch up. Houses, fences, cars dive into the dark like wrecked ships. I gain my bearings— shadows move through the field, corrupt ghosts whose dirty hands drag the grass— and listen for the hum of
The female llamas make sucking noises as they drink. They bat their tails sideways. As they bed down, the creek’s waves roll over their coats in laps. They moisten their necks on the rocks and rub their wool clean. The males press their chests into
This is how the waking goes: sickly sweet trill of birdsong against glass the near-transparent world returned to life sharpening figures my mouth rounds into that first silent syllable that proves the dream hasn’t ended in the expected kind of light I think there’s too
We drove along the edge of the burn line, right down to the Columbia River, 70 mph with the windows rolled up. One month and 50 percent-contained, the air tasted like char and the sea. Saw where fire fell upwards and cascaded into wind, jumped
Let’s work this out in the dark. I find you, you find me. A snapshot under a streetlight’s warm brim, small furred mouths taking moth bodies whole. Intimacy is blood in the pitched chambers, trace and return, the long-foretold figure-eight of oxygenated rush. It requires
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