The small setting sun, an iron sheet of pain It curls up into half-light, rolls as a breeze through lychee trees Its blue flame burns inside the furnace And then moves slowly across the roaring machine table It awkwardly slips through my oily fingers And casts its beading […]
The aerial view looks like a bathtub filled with colored pencils. But the pencils are splintered. The tub, an ocean. Imagine a blue iris magnified, imagine a marble sliced in half— The newspapers measure things comparatively. Everything floating is bigger than Texas and it’s moving faster […]
* * * For several years, Senior Prose Editor Eric Darton has been aiming to connect me with Bronwyn Mills, a writer and person he thought I should know and would probably love: he solicited this piece from her, to introduce me to her work. Meanwhile, I engaged Bronwyn in […]
23* The willing ass is bared to be whipped with electricity. Come to me lover in Apollo’s chariot; I want to wash myself in the dawn of your hair, as alder pollen is paroled on an April breeze. 51 Does the yolk of my […]
Read “The Musing Gaze: a conversation with Chad Parmenter” here. Your form—framed by my small hands, that you called “dangerous to know”—looked so like a fever dream of a tree to me. The truth of the universe is ruin—it insists—but out of the ruin the new—your core. I […]
These are people of “(ironically) tiger-striped couch,” of “knowing how people got to be the people they are & how much it cost them,” of coke snorted in bathrooms on immigrant parents’ dimes. Into this milieu we recognize even if we wish we didn’t, in unpredictable […]
Read “The Musing Gaze: a conversation with Chad Parmenter” here. She’s the image you are but far more—more star-beautiful—and by that I mean mutable—Maria, Joan in “Passion of Joan of Arc,” scintillant with distance, giant, silent on the screen where I see her, leave her, am free from […]
The red-phase eft, in its land-based incarnation, dangled by its forelegs in a small, messy cobweb off a low porch step in the Adirondack woods. The spider, diminutive compared to its recent catch, moved purposefully over the body of the red eft apparently trying to inject it with enough […]
Women grease a watermelon with Crisco. Men divide into teams, dive into the deep end, and wrestle it out of the water. Each year, the rules are the same: to win requires the shell cracked on concrete. We […]
TQ2 Prose Open Runner-Up I. Parry Sound, Canada The first morning: three otters on the dock: dark, slick with lake water, posed together family-portrait style. The second morning: two deer across the milky bay: the mother demure in white socks, the gawky fawn kicking up its skinny legs. The […]