Category: Issue 25

                     Books I put up next to you. As close as I can without belonging. Gods in awe of other gods.                      Digging up love as new each time.                 …

Small motors for taming grass moan, the day not so hot, in the Times the columns of the dead are short ones dried fronds droop at the tops of palms, brown petticoats to fall on walkers as Santa Anas send husks flying the dream with a bride upended, long white veil trailing a dance performance…

from Crown for Peasant Heads X.  그래 니가 없는 건 당연하지 You are not there as a matter of course.You carry the box you dust in. You kick the dog wayside, no telling what’s worse:the damage you carry or damage pickedclean from the teeth and spat out. What  is hurt when your own animal yelpsand retreats…

You’re a bluffing   a color-matching.  Fingers on the breeders cup. You’re the gentle way that oxen pull a carriage through a needle while people movers move people into the breach into the Paraguay swampland love green love the reptiles and brushwork so pretty. You’re the movement of a letter           …

CONSIDER THE WOMB          With lines from Ewa Chrusciel, Nicole W. Lee, and the Babylonian Talmud Consider womb as a bird.Uterine lining lifting a wing as it rots the pink walls.  Consider womb as a flickering candle.There has to be somewhere from where words are born.  If they’re born, do we mother…

into ل ’s       and Allah isa mutilationof meaning in  prayers       are refrainsof nursery rhymes       the childrendraw a fighterplane belownames of the extinct birds         and emperorscross the Indusfor mangoes— lightsweetened, sweating golden     sun–flower stalksthe indigo          laboureron her…

           after Cathy Linh Che  My grandfather walked in the snowWith his green jacket& plastic bag On the balcony we builta short snowmanwith a cold carrot My grandfather had a very thickhead of hairLong eyebrows…bright eyes He told us storiesHe made us toastHe fought in the warHe knew the word “MONSTER”And…

  Silks traveled through many hands, starting in the Orient.Don’t tell me, love, God made the stars for us to orient. Before we ever started, war gathered across continents.Still, love, I’d forgotten your penchant to disorient. Your ash rains again from the west, blotting the lords of the sky.Tell me how to set fire to…

  The Rough Beast Would Like The Future To Be Clear That he is made of the past like a junk shop with split-frame washboards and dolls with crazed, crazy eyes: some composite that doesn’t age well. Like human history. Some experimental glueand plastic and silicon carbide known to beflammable and cause cancer in the state of California (how…

With its scent the acacia tunnel bends air. She enters, not bent.                              Mother, tongue                              of a bell never asleep: Betrayer, you            …