Writing as a landscape, a warning– don’t mistake placidity for peace. It could be that the stillness of the trees is self-imposed, the dormant volcano, disciplined; though tired of being a backdrop, too tired to do much else but stay, glacial, to wrinkle the horizon with creases the same non-hue as a day-moon, elusive, barely showing up in photos.
You get the sweeter guava I get the crisper night This is what I hear when I talk to you now: the blurble of nearby fountains and incessant motorbikes. You said you felt old and I said so-and-so got married and so all we really spoke about were different types of distance and the connection kept failing as if to drive a point home– it must be so nice to get away from it
The rain coming down to soften our edges to dampen as to muffle not as to douse Such mildness today we thought we’d have a standoff but all we got was tired understanding the kindness that evolves when nothing else is left It’s been a long week everything is weary us the sky gone pewter the slickening roads and bridges that pull towards home and there’s never a lack of water here a glut of […]
Pour it out a perfect phrase there’s no way of getting some things back and every night at every second mere feet from disaster cars course along the freeway Beyond the exit a soccer match is being written out under the spill of floodlights by leg and sinew and there’s many ways the game could go but in the end it can only go one of them so much determined by these white painted lines […]
What becomes ischemic when long denied hope? Deferral and deferral how long must it go on for living tissue about thirty minutes before it’s irreversible and reperfusion though vital just adds injury on insult and this hurts unless it’s good and dead and then you better cut it out quick but just how the hell would you debride a soul? Or determine the margins of what’s left if anything
This breeze is coming in from somewhere is every bit as intentional as this dappled sun these lean robins the pagan call of the flicker that echoes from the maples shouting what we all already know slowly but surely color is returning to this world
Full of fog-deadened air the forest so still that a breath is all that stirs, no birds, and I almost feel guilt for taking one in, so rare is the air here, so alien the sky, so unworldly this morning among the immediacy of trunks: pine, fir, pine, fir, fir, pine, cedar– I’ve only come to set my emptiness in a greater stretch of it, to sit a bit somewhere where silence is still the […]
When St Valentine came to the States he found work in a meat-packing plant living with some Slavs in a tenement just beyond the stockyards. Blue-eyed, stout, he broke down carcasses daily and the vagaries of a new language, naming his children things like Jenny and Fred and coming home smelling of offal and blood until Valentin became Valent became William, shedding the weight he had gained as a new-eyed baby— the crimson name of […]
I called both fights, the Armenian, then Adams, the latter spelling out his bad intentions with a nasty right hook, the former, though rusty, knowing every trick in the book. Oh, age. I could be proud that I’m never surprised but I’d trade it all for something unpredictable for once, not just Friday nights in sweats, texting my dad about the fights— I think this guy will win, and then he does. What did Teddy […]
And then they returned those birds to stratify the sky to incise with wings their variable trajectories and sometimes a sign is actually a sign like when one letter burnt out so that the neon spelled a name once spoken still known if barely but no I’ve heard that song before it seems if anything that hope precludes action and a chance sighting on the street is only routine entropy hokum really even today I […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 