because it’s hailing in the desert and the horses seem unmoved by a sky full of loose teeth. Each in its own cell going about the business of life. Only one mare presses the bars of her stall and though her bite could unstring a hand, mine reaches […]
The human brain weighs 1300 grams, about the heft of one two-slice toaster. I love this equivalence, picture a toaster on shoulders and torso and think of a nonexistent Magritte, with some title like The Veneration […]
Pink as a seashell. Mid-yawn, breasts rising like soldiers. In the shopping cart, duct tape & eye cream. The car red as a tongue. Your tongue, a car, spanning the city. The door rings & you don’t open it. There is Lisbon on the other side. Three children […]
I couldn’t say exactly when the thermal met the dew point and I knew I was cloud. Like walking rain, I’ve traveled far without touching ground. Today I saw a kestrel ride a convergence (that invisible quarrel between warm and cold air). I have lived her lust […]
What’s left is hunt. Is father’s shirt quickening on the line. Is the long professorial praying mantis puttering the garden, glossed in moonlight, waiting for dinner […]
Here, in the clinic, a therapist asks the child to draw a picture of her body—to color all the places where it hurts, and color all the places where it feels good. No medical examiner, no jury, just a child and her pencils—in this version she is taller […]
In group, when the counselor sets a big pad of paper on an easel at the front of the room and asks each of us to write an inspiring quote or lyric, I go with All you need is love, which I think of as a question, a true […]
The title is Survive This The title is Whispered into My Hands The title is Blue Hills, Blue Rain The title is In the Winter to End All Winters The title is Phoebe of New England The title is Laughter in the Psychiatric Ward The title is The Quiet […]
Sometimes I imagine looking into the eyes of the stranger who held the gun. Everybody is some kind of animal when they dance. It’s not the gyrating body, humming for its skin to be licked, bit, that I miss as I grow old but the possibility of getting […]
for Nichole My friend is waiting to find out if her rapist will be paroled. They are supposed to call her if he walks free. I go to her apartment to help her unpack. She moved after her landlord fixed her front window with cardboard. Her […]