what was it that drove the weather / underground underground? / what was the switch that flipped back / their hair to show twelve foreheads / crowned with coming bullets? . was it the times, was it …
Dimitris Lyacos is the author of the Poena Damni trilogy (Z213: EXIT, With The People From The Bridge, The First Death). So far translated into six major languages, Poena Damni developed as a work in …
Rod Stewart and his entourage swaggered out onto the terrace restaurant of our little hotel in Italy wearing matching whites, coordinated, like a basketball team of alcoholics.
It is May 2016 in the paper conservation lab of the Menil Collection in Houston, and a group of researchers and I are coming face to face with the dense sophistication of Trisha Brown's choreography. …
On a Sunday morning a few months ago I went to Mondoñedo, a small town in Galicia, Spain. My friend took me there to show me where her family was from. Hundreds of years ago, the village was quite …
In our current image-saturated global culture and speculative economic contemporary society, images and objects are endowed with multiple layers of meaning. The group of images brought together in …
On October 22, 2016, The New York Times published an op-ed piece by political reporter Alec MacGillis titled "Go Midwest, Young Hipster." It reads as incredibly uninformed now--the opening line is …
Northbound on Interstate 65 on the outskirts of Nashville, just past the shoulder of the highway, is a monument to the Confederacy. A rust-colored bucking horse mounted by a bearded Confederate …
You in your resplendent prose / Me in my wilding and tumbleweed syntax / You and the spackled floors of a harbinger house / Me and my trinity of holes / You in the tiger cage / Me in my pile of …
Inside you there is another you / The you inside you has a tight hold on your body that's why your fingernails curl roundly / inward, your outer ears eddying also get sucked into your body if the you …
Gentlemen of Ghent / gentlemen of Ghana gentlemen at leisure / With Ivana in Tehran gentlemen aplenty gentlemen may I call you / Gentlemen gentlement this one weird trick to reduce / Ungentlemanly …
When an eagle reaches mid-age, it becomes the top predator. / Like an arrow, it can catch prey with its eyes closed. / When it reaches that age / It decides to fall from the sky where it spent half …
In Lars von Trier's film, Melancholia, Kirsten Dunst's / character, Justine, tries to keep one step ahead of it. / You can see this in the first half of the film / where, at her own wedding, she …
Because knowing is impossible / and imagining is lethal. / Let the possible be / child of the real, / splitting the rock.
Bachelors of atmosphere making / pals wherever in their white tuxedos. / Ladies stroll stiff drinks across / democratic cloud cover. / Leaving is thus so easy, despite the red gnaw of my pretty hand …
Like La Llorona I weep / "Ay, ay, ay..." // I am // infertile. A womb / of skin & blood & bone stitched / to wind & words & dust.
You are traveling with a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage. Now how to safely cross the river? Here's a hint. One room contains a tiger, one a lady. The third contains a coyote and Joseph Beuys. First the …
love you, heathen passenger, gonna help the nun / sitting across the aisle on a LA bound flight / dressed in drab habit, bone scapular & bright belief
Lizards flatten against hot dirt. The mountain belongs / to the mountain lion. As a cactus stiffens at a stranger's / breath, your thumb trails the hairs down my stomach.
begins witnessing their disappearance how, by instinct they un-navigate / back into the privet their stillness their unwillingness to trust june's / afternoon's silence beneath no breeze until
When the human lunges for my hand, my face / is a perfect, solid screen.
Madam or most likelier Sir by now / you have noticed the salt-dark smell of sulfur
to play possum apply a temp shroud and blow
Last night I dreamt of the house where I don't live and don't possess / it had blue walls and a membrane of quince instead of a roof.
the sky enraged / sharp points of rain / one kid holds a / calico cat / under an umbrella
I wish to be water / so I can't be held.
Lay me down on top / of your Hummer // like an 8-foot Douglas // spruce you hacked
In the city of Chiannesi (Umbria, Italy) during Mardi Gras, there arose the custom of exchanging spirits--women would exchange with men, children with their parents, etc.
i am in the grayspace and the grayspace is like the moon, moon surrounded by desert but not quite
ghost rot & electrified warble in the wake / of Auto-tune reek of something fraudulent: / egos without deodorant stinking like Lincoln's / legacy--
an orange horizon beyond the sunset-- / it could've been like that but it wasn't.
To defend ourselves against a mermaid / this bitch turned up in the pond behind the village / in the approaching winter
Having a baby is awesome, I definitely recommend it, / in the same way I encourage you to go to the hospice / wing and hold what part of your father's body you can / reach through the tubing as he …
From April 17, 1972, to June 2, 1988, Bobby Chacon boxed 67 bouts, a total of 431 rounds, with a record of 59 wins (47 by way of knockout), 7 losses (5 by way of knockout) 1 no contest.
(Before the bullets, before I bled out / on the concrete under an American / sun, I loved white roses.)
Starfish between them / fatten on tube worms / trapped in the tide pool
I was a sharp-shooting cowboy trapped in the body of an eight-year-old girl, and I wanted a guy friend to hang out with. Ray, blond and tall for a second-grader, with a perpetual sunburn and a …
Some nights on Sardinia I find myself holding my breath. Long after the sun has set and the heat simmers over miles of sand and sleeping towns I lie awake and stop breathing.
At nineteen, I take a Greyhound from small-town Iowa to Chicago, Illinois, to see American Gothic in a museum. The painting features a farmer and his spinster daughter in front of a white peaked …
Because I am a girl, I say I was born in the Year of the Chicken. I reserve the cock for men.
The rosary, like the color wheel, is a meditation I have never prayed. The wheel, like the rosary, is composed of three mysteries. The two together are broken into five intercessions. My hands circle …
Charles looked at himself in the rearview mirror and saw that his eyes were no longer red--there was that at least. He wished that he had taken the shower offered to him at Lionel's place, because he …
As a schoolteacher, I often bent to tie the shoes of the youngest children. I tousled their hair at recess. Chalk in hand, I learned to scold, but the children looked past me, out the window, …
On the day we found Mrs. Lovász, I didn't kill myself. Which is a funny thing to say--finding Mrs. Lovász. We knew where she was. She was only dead, not missing.
It was the summer the bees finally died, and everything started to look like a baby. "You mean feel like," Ali corrected immediately.
Uncle Bobby showed up barefoot on my grandmother's doorstep one night in late July. The kitchen door was open so the balmy air could circulate through the screen and she saw him standing there …
The people who believed in everything are long gone. / Their little temples and folk vestments, inscrutable. My dad's / family with their mouse masks and leaky chamber pots / and pine straw and red …
In a net of light against the buggy dusk, / squinting at my neighbor's just-hayed field, / hot whir still in my ears from the sickle bar / that wiped out how many nests of what, or / nearly?
"This storm will not break our spirit. We are in this together and we will rebuild even greater together after." -- Sylvester Turner " If we have learned anything, it is how the current can …
