Category: Issue 26

  Aubade My ghosts line up, mouths full of bitter  greens and sweet grasses,  names chalked on the walls                                      of ruined buildings, the night smelling of their breath.  One wears a split lip,  saxophone-blown. Sometimes he calls                  in sick. I am not your splendid harness. Don’t wait up. What is sleep anyway.  Barnyard animals, goats…

  Tiny words, real but illegible.  The dog finds a small dead body and nuzzles it with her nose.  Sometimes the petals of moon flowers tear as they open.  A linguistic change is called a juncture loss.  And here you’ll have to use your imagination because I’m not sure.  Back then we grew mock orange…

Suppose, you say, it began with the chickens,the way one wing raised could unbalance,the way they learnedto tilt their heads in a concession to gravity, all at once. Yes! I like it, I say.The pleasure of synchronicity.The pigs, being dominantin cognition, would be next.They might listen to the rainand learn rhythmfrom the downspout. Music, it seemed to…

I’m gonna love you like nobody’s loved you with the rain flickering against my parted windowand the sheets pooled around my hips was when I felt the first note at the bottom of my stomachthat suggested it wasn’t the bottom and there was more mystery to fall throughthan I could imagine perhaps less the bottom of my stomach than the precipice of my stomachand my first…

Something so heavy with meaning all we can do     is drag our hands across the surface itching to define to fixas a compass point                               navigating what I thought I understood because I lived within its skin and yet      …

SLEEPING WITH JANE Again I mutate as we move throughthe old park, ready to launch past the spectral-fired flowers, past the Japanese elm sighingalongside the swarm of Jizo statues,bald little monks tall as wine bottles,each transmitting a silent symphony of grief—Jizo, protector of unborn babies. Jizo, an army of stone guardians stalwart in cardinal colored capsand bibs—I rise above the…

Killer whales have stopped reproducing. Polar bears are eating their cubs.  Koalas abandon their young. Breathless,nose low to the brush to keep from choking on rising smoke,they run towards the thousands, pounds of food we airdroppedwhere earth stopped burning or flames just hadn’t reached yet,guilt for our part in this end or fear it would come for usthe same.…

inverse twin, lost sister I.               Like our dead, you live in memory: our grandmother’s clouded eyes               saw you instead of me. In the cold,                             my bones still ache along…

I am thankful for the acres in the inchesa poem makes on the page of its saying.Like in this one, there is a large meadowwith a long table in the middle of it,and seated at the table, every friendand ancestor I could ever invoketurns their faces to me and mouths the wordsof a pop song…

beautiful things lived here.That small boned bird that glowed in the understory.That big wide mushroom that was underneath us that whole time.That elm the autumn of the drought when the leaves fell before they changed.I stood under a field of green on a field of green on a field of green.I understood then. There is…

SOUTHWEST OF BABYLON surely the ewe lambs, ramming their heads into their mothers’ tits, can show me how to pray. i have been following their belched bleating across hilltops, me and my diet of dates. walking. stopping. grazing beneath an olive tree. stone by stone we make our way. i wanted to know where home…

COSMOLOGY  Cold hands—warm torso—time like an orange— time like a bag of salt gray oxen drag— How many years of salt? Then, one day, a shell.  And fire, where joints should be.A field of rose, a town  of anthracite, river of milk— a face that hisses, sizzles— girls who sort potatoes in the dark—I orient myself by smell. …