By evening, everything changes to/a startling non-color. A clock chimes/in the hallway. I sit down at me desk/and try to write the letter to my brother./Then he dies.
Caravaggio too knew/that violence and murder underlie religion, eroticism, all/civilization.
When you think of me, don't think of me wooing/the bed all thick-tongued with vodka./O god, come to my assistance./don't think of me baby-/oiled in a green bikini with dirty feet.
So how could I teach it to you. I think/the body's a hub and bodies are spokes/and there are things worth setting the house/on fire for, but hard to know what things/they are plus they may shift and …
Too easy/to say Shiva/or Janus/or butterfly/effect or tree/of life or/Christmas/wreath because/it is December
An old lady fell out of the window because she was too curious. She fell out of the window and was smashed to pieces.
(because maybe I am and Elsie)/isn't a spot in my head, in my whole goddam spotted heart.
This pleasing or displeasing you,/I curl my hair into a ball of strays.
Remember the night I passed my test and the Thai/place where you took me brought my rice pressed/into the shape of a heart,a maraschino cherry/bleeding sweetly on the top?
You warn me you'll be wearing a suit. Don't./Warn me if you're going to be naked, killed, careless,/in flames.
I teach all day, get a weak signal at night,/Malbec, Idol, pasta, peas, cherries. Night, night./Wake at three a.m. to wind-streaked dark, I know/death thinks about me, like a dog...
It's a great sea of stupid people./An ocean of idiots./Everyone just sort of bobs around/And bumps into each other./A lot of the stupid people are kids./Fat, ugly kids.
We are waiting in line for the carousel. My mother's breath is short and shallow. the closer we get, the more must support her. I'm dizzy, she says. I have to lie down. Her breath as if. In labor.
I am sewing a quilt in the shape of my hand. I am sewing a quilt in the shape of my arm. I am sewing a quilt in the shape of my body, a quilt that will cover me perfectly, so long as I lie stiller …
I have a bird in my mouth. He can't get out. his wings and head keep struggling. Everybody notices bulges in my cheeks and asks what's wrong. Rrmmrmff I say.I can't seem to get my mouth wide enough …
the fox body and another and the snow thicket. two foxes circling as bodies, the bodies rigid, the bodies circling in the neighborhood of a thicket rigid with bodies foxes red. the foxes wit tails …
The teacher can't hear the children/over all this monsoon racket,/all the zillion spoons whacking/the rusty roods, all the wicked tin streams/flipping full-grown bucks off their hooves.
I admire you most, boldly/drawn boy in Bronzino's/Venus. Oil on wood. where/you, Cupid, cup/your mother's breast & bend/your pale, putto's mouth to her.
The last I saw of him was on the final neurasthenic afternoon of his harmonica/When he lost his hair ad said I did this to him with my grief,/As the pink halo of a monk's scalp began to shine up …
An intriguing tale crops up in oral history interviews conducted with Los Angeles artists and curators of the 1950s. Recounted by the curator Walter Hopps, the artist Craig Kauffman, and …
Paris, 1952 Scene 1: Sisyphus' Garret SISYPHUS: Nature sold me a lie, and I’ve kept the deceit On my face to remind me: Her falsehoods repeat Like the seasons renew. Same advice every time, …
With the right combination of numbers, a phone discharges .22 caliber rounds, and that’s enough to silence the witnesses. Bedposts fall under “less spy, more convenient” and can be wiped clean. …
I have a bird in my mouth. He can’t get out. His wings and head keep struggling. Everybody notices bulges in my cheeks and asks what’s wrong. Rfmmrmff I say. I can’t seem to open my mouth wide …
And because you’re not an antelope or a dog you think you can’t drop your other two limbs down and charge toward the Eternal Heart. But those are your legs too, the ones that have hauled your …
–Ecrit par L’Automate de Maillardet From the long view, the wetlands stun me— patches of long grass sway like dauphinesses lost in a troubadour’s …
How is it you can explain their living here with me, leaning On their cellos, doleful and plenty. In my single-person tax-bracket of one alive, there are more Living here with me not alive Than …
There are many unplanned ways to say goodbye: stealing away, making a show, lying drunk and intertwined in lawns. Against the washing machine in our friends’ sunroom, this may be the last time I …
I love you so much I want to bury my fist in your chest. Eleventeen. Nico Alvarado teaches middle school in Colorado.
You want to know what it was like? It was like my whole life had a fever. Whole acres of me were on fire. The sun talked dirty in my ear all night. I couldn’t drive past a wheatfield without doing …
Jerusalem, early February. Michael and I walk from West to East, past the Rolex store, down the old road to the Arab bus station. There are sparrows flying in circles above us, frozen …
When I was twenty-six, I sought out my professor and asked to be chosen to accompany him on the prison creative writing workshop for reasons I couldn’t even articulate. The first …
Three small beanbags rest in my right palm, waiting flight. They are meant to be globes in our spinning solar system: moon, Earth, sun. The moon leans against my middle finger, the …
How good it’s been to slide back the heart’s hood awhile, how fortunate there’s a heart and a covering for it, and that whatever is still warm has a chance –Stephen Dunn, …
I have ended it five times. She forgets each day that it’s ended. Each day, another patient or a nurse tells her that I’ve left. She calls me in a panic and wants to know if it’s true. I say …
It had a lock and a key, the first book I wrote. A red leatherette five-year diary. The lock and key were the most important part—absolute privacy, the invitation to candor. A book that was a room …
The first issue of Domestic Crude, the journal that would ultimately become Gulf Coast, was published i 1982. We recently turned up what is perhaps the only extant copy of that issue, opened to page …
This is winter as casserole, as the French word for saucepan. This is a season so freezing, it doubles back on itself and simmers. Sometimes, our bodies get so cold, they burn. Sometimes, in the …
A word will shatter thought: skull, stone, star, rabbit: everything here, now, lost and still to come in this moment. There’s no reason why he can’t remember the future. Even now the light of …
Parts fall out of the conversation like paper snowflakes you cut out in kindergarten, mostly holes. You want to ask the girl next to you to translate, but you glance at her name tag and don’t know …
Sleep had been elusive since Mazzy had been called home from the Army, just after the last storm, but night after night she lay beside her sister because the girl said she couldn’t sleep without …
He’s thought about asking her, about mentioning that she smells like smoke, but he doesn’t know how. He used to, but lately all they do is smile politely and nod to one another like strangers …
Then I pour the first jarful of honey over his thigh: my own little touch to the ceremony. I manipulate that honey into golden shapes: an X for the fallen, an H for the Harlan family name, a big old …
“I have no manuscripts, no notebooks, no archives,” wrote Osip Mandelstam, “I have no handwriting because I never write. I alone in Russia work from the voice, while all around the bitch pack …
If white noise meant any shade other than the stone dark of / a closed eye, you would / remember that a hammer can also build, a shoulder can also / hold, nightshade can wake, / you would remember …
Our daughters go south and come back changed, smaller, with sliced-off hair and silences they themselves don’t understand. Our sons go south and east and west and come back sad, diminished, their …
