Every Which Way
For Richard Serra
We seek a darkness in the deep, andequilibrium every which way under the sea.
But the shore is relentless, insistent, ithunts what is free, searching forfinality in the water’s infinity. It turnsus into prey—naked nightswimmers
scared of the silence in the black. Scare…
Notes Toward a Pure Hauntology
History is perched and crooning –a vulture’s smirk reflectedin fawn’s blood fifty feet below.
Turning cog! Tuning fork! –imbibe me; strike me as useful and send metumbling toward a more delicious reality.
I have found my kin there –beneath the pungent forest floor.Beneath the rot of outdat…
Chipped Blue Paint
Mi abuela came to America wearing a tattered potato sack, holding my mother, swaddled in palm leaves, in her good right hand, her only one left. With what little money she had, plus a few good games of poker, she bought a dingy, one-bedroom apartment in the basement floor of a crumbling…
Duplex Beginning with a Line by Edward Hirsch
At midnight the soul dreams of a small fire,night balmy but body shivering
in the quivering atmosphere, heat and chill. A keenness the soul perceives as black ice
sticks and burns in dry ice’s cold clarity,a lone lucidity—a conflagration
whose biting flare c…
Duplex Beginning with a Line by Marvin Bell
He saw himself as coal, on its way to glass,thinning through a pane of time. Scarlatti
danced window-thin under fingers, lively and crystalline in its sharp velocity—
the velocity of intense, crystalline light—morning’s illusion of clarity
in a breath’s elus…
August is All You’re Allowed
It’s a log cabin I hole myselfup in Thoreau-style, my only neighborsthe pines, cedars, the black walnutslittering the floor with their dense bodymusty, bittersweet, thickNPR calls it the un-walnut andthe black birds agree, knockingthe fat fruit from the canopyembodying how thump is sounded outb…
A Tanka to Remember our Ancient City
For a period of seven years, I sang opera ariasfloating on water wearing a giant dress made of umbrellas
I wasn’t aware of it at the time
We were not aware of what we weredoing when we waltzed uponRte. 355 at 4 in the morning.Stepping lightly:
One,
two,
thre…
haibun with view of God and forest
prayer used to mean eyes sewn shut tighter than seams on abaseball. these rituals now seem superfluous, so tonight we took a walkin some woods—that God and I—we chatted, I cried, and they made nonoise as it paced over the earth, over dust from now-dead suns—which long ago she recycled into my li…
The Index of Secrets
The earth is a volatile, shifting being, its wonders both hidden and revealed. Magma bubbles and flows thirty kilometers below its surface, a place where time doesn’t exist, forever searching for cracks and weaknesses to squeeze through to exposure and make itself known. To be seen.
•
…
A Prediction of Rain
Blood is dripping from her mouth as she brushes her teeth. Her eyes have a dull intensity as she works the electric brush left to right, always left to right. The routine is unvarying as she proceeds to the next stage, up an…
Hydrophobia
Golden friends launch like missilesinto aquamarine glinting with diamonds.Tunneling earthworm, I keepthree points of contact at all times.They laugh, encourage, bribe, threaten.“You’ll pop right back up. See?Just like us.”
Another pool, another hot daythirteen or fourteen summers beforewhen I…
Bricolage
My mom reconstructed our lives from junk.Unbleached cardboard Orisha beaded masks,Glass-shard mosaics of proud Mary’s face,A twisted crown of bottle caps and barbed wire,Found relics, littered our tar-paper house,Each objet d’art, a fetish, meant to staveThe shame of being poor. We ate, eac…
Where I Place my Roots
The palm of my hand reads like a road mapthe lines are dirt roads leading up toa yellow porch dog blinking at neighborswarding off cicadas, water dripping fromhis big dog snout. I followed a crease, pastthe wobbly legs of weeping willows,to Miss Kat’s fudge brownies andher stories of the men who…
One Night Celibacy
Sometimes,
I
thinkabout mygravestone,what’ll thename be? Who’llclean it? Sometimes,I think aboutmy bones, aremy hipsshifted? Will th…
Only So Much
Dad calls my name in the chaos of unlit morning,says, Get up.
He is in a starched shirt and tie, shaved,small piece of reddened tissue on his chin. Mom left yesterday, Sunday.
Dad has no choice but to take me with him to Queens where he manufactures f…
The Pump Quench
The mug of racing timeblinks its eyes as you enter.Words seem molecularin your voice, a naturalgift, cool as someone else’srain in someone else’s city.The brasserie’s yellow lightjaundices your eye withoutdulling the furtive look yourehearsed for decades.It shines through the thinnestof learned …
En Route
En Route : A Haibun Sequence
1. Meridian, Mississippi
Meridian was where my passengers needed to go, three church ladies in pastel hats whose car had broken down alongside a tract of logged-out pine. They were fanning themselves in the shade when I stopped to offer help. A Samaritan, prais…
Note-taking While Reading “The Marvel Ciphers of the Gig Economy”
We know what kind of people we are–musical or allergic,sclerotic and/or criminal–
based upon the ads we are fed.In the economy of the hypermobilefetish,
we can’t not internalizewhat we might be prone to buyif signaled to.
Last week we were contactedby radio wavesthree hundred billion …
City Exegesis
3 A.M. turns cities into earlier centuries.
The streets turn into lanes. Streetlights into lanterns. Faces become countenances. The sky shows up gloomy.
It’s 3 A.M. in Lower Manhattan. The arsonist strolls into the frame wearing tennis shoes, a hoodie, cargo shorts, and a little kid’s back…
Late Frost
An uncle set up milk cratesand tobacco sticks, ran longwires between post and barn
while three aunts drapedpainter’s cloths, openedbedsheets and fabric coverings,
shrouded over sprouted greensand new shoots from a conditionwarned but yet to transpire.
In the failing light breath rose…
Dos Gatos Coffee Bar-Johnson City, TN
There are these moments in my life when I feel like I can stop time, but time is a fickle thingthat doesn’t stop for anyone and I realized this the day I got a call from my mom telling memy grandma had seven days to live but she died in three at three in the morning and I wonderhow three could b…
The Separation Anxiety
All the while I was aware of what would happen with Jakie later. He had been trailing behind Seema all across the house since she had worn that perfume. His insecurity returned and grasped him wholly as he followed us into the bedroom and saw the bags were packed up. He traveled across the room …
one’s own estuary
I slip both arms into my past like a coat soakedfrom the inside with something that isn’t water,a thing viscous as blood or sap so that thestickiness makes me a sleepwalker with nothingto lose, and with nothing I step out into thewhite on white light under Baudelaire’s injuredmoon—heaving the in…
The Start of New
railroad tracks ranlike spaced steps acrosswarm earth.
the distance between eachmeasured by held handsand conversations.
strawberry alcohol paintedmy lips a shade of redand I learned how much he lovedhis mother.
abandoned tracks toweredover a river, lifelessthe only breathing from the o…
The Summer of the Baby Birds
My mother saved a nest of baby birdsin early May, the air mild and hushedwhen you can see the gray meltinginto colors we forgot existed.She saved them in a shoebox, the4 or 5 warm pink bellies and worried herself sick.
I heard if we touch a newborn animal,its mother won’t come back. But I dro…
Duplex: When the Moon Rises Above the Hill
Robin’s-egg sky cracks and runs ceruleanits royal-blue yolk twilight and ocean,
rolling into night, tide deeper than thought, broader than a slow breath and free—
free as breathing once was. Gold and silver gleam,pinpricks buoyant as the bobbing moon.
The moo…
Note-Taking While Listening to “The Dock of the Bay”
Cold hemocoels of the mollusk,ambergris lanced from a demigod’s head,
ballasts shifted according to the tide.Long necks in Styrofoam
filled with ice.The sea produces grey scales
no animal can wear.The eyes have microcosmic
temperaments so that to speakof storms must be a literal act,…
No te vayais
While the sun in its daily pilgrimage reminds the mortal of mortality, she does subtraction, lineardifferences in distance, age and burdensome inhibitions. The water’s song on the shore telling —no, singing — another story, don’t leave, keep returning to the ocean’s salted lips of that firstkiss…
Cousins Who Are Cooler Than You
Camacho knows guys from a town over; he has cousins there. Not a one of them—he or his cousins—grew up anywhere but a rural corner of overlooked American community. You’d never see them anywhere in the media, unless one of them committed a crime too horrendous not to share. And even with tha…
Contemplation On Bleachers in Humboldt Park
I’m learning I’m scared of the things I understand. Of the things that I cannot: light cutting through The fence and becoming on dead-aged wood, fractals of shadows.
When I can dare, I look at what should beThe clay of the diamond, but is the sparkle of albedo.That is, until the sun …
