Category: Issue 28

These toys:Stacked so short of the sky.  Horizon of thorns. Every cresting waveThe taunting laugh              Of the long game.  There are things onlyHuman hands are built for:To screw, to unscrew.  Fingers in the saltwater Scramble Your second language,Mistaking                        Fish For                        Sin. 

ARS POETICA  between sky & earth         the mouth perches             its heavy want its slick parables                so far from the fingers        actual agents of ardor i mistype poem as             pomefrom the french     …

Like any other reasonable children who want to play with their small goat but don’t know how to explain their games because they don’t know enough goat words, my brother and I strap on skateboard helmetsand take turns headbutting with Roger. What else did she expect us to do?I’m not saying my mom’s the devil when she’s angry, but…

At the entrance to the museum was a model townmade to depict how the city had once been.In the model there were no people but lightsilluminated all angles. The butcher shop, the grocer, the pomegranate stand.Rugs the color of dried plums and large bellied pots lined the walls. With his thick fingers the director pointed to a map,this is…

The bed was thus, the curtains were therefore.The moon floated past the window frame and appeared to be. Fans roared as softly as. A blue light becoming, or a wind unlike anything outside.Or a memory of, but less than. In other words, a fine dust settling on the dust ruffle. Released from memory. Released into remembering.Motor coach and reservoir, children…

The man dreams under the tree. Or is he dead.  My students can never agree. How sealed is  that scene. Peaceful but sealed and the birds  are cut out. Their outlines remain but they  have fled. How to be free. That is what  the man dreams, folded arms, ankles crossed. When I was a nanny,…

  I was born amongspeech-prone animals, blind to all but the sliverabove. I see the hawks often there—inseparable,a pair, red-shouldered. Omen of tall woods and water.The first hawk oak-alighted to hunt the bridle path,the second circling, her kee-aah letting the other birds—at the rim of perception— know of my unknowing?  

outside the dementia ward  a woman tumbled fresh-hatched from the egg of herself is watchingsmall children plant geraniums in the garden’s empty places, knees in the dirt, steered by a lay sister who if not                                          a nun is still…

  The Historian’s Shadow In questions of history I am caught between the confluence of two seas. I am measuring the height of their shadows with an inch-tape. I am wondering about integrity. I would like to kiss your nose. Soon enough, I am standing on the edge of the water at night. I am…

Time is a heady gardenia, white scent pulling me into the green underswellin which I am young and still unstacking the matryoshka doll of his mind. A desire path, the internet says, is a consequence of unruliness, through foliage an unplanned line not setby formal design. They expedite our wanting of home, of fields with their herds of bells, of fish the…

  The coals throw off their last heat.The night is thick, lowto the ground. If I am to survive,I must breathe from the space between rotting leaves and daffodils’ first green shoots.

Somewhere in Northern Ohio, on a farmmy mother is drunk, kissing an opencut, placing my hands to my sides.  She is covered in moths. She keeps saying I am your mother                I am your mother                The moon is blood; Wears her…