Territory Folks
After mother remarried, her new husband shot the horse that had returned with an empty saddle. It hadn’t let anyone but me ride it since. You couldn’t slam a door or fire a gun, it would kick down the...
View ArticleThe Future Abbess Picks Spilled Lentils Off the Countertop
This love is no excuse for clumsiness. I must start paying better attention. Or is it simply distraction I’ve been craving? No, No. Come here, damn you! I want to make a plain stew with onions, a...
View ArticleMoth Man
They tell me you’re there, all you would-be witnesses. Clustered outside the gate. Each of you clutching your candle like a little white lie, right hand cupping the flame, the hot wax dribbling down...
View ArticleThe Bad Girl
The first time I did it for money I crouched in a cave of filthy sheets & bit the back of my hand to keep from crying. The moon has teeth. I was marked at birth: a bad apple. No doors or windows so...
View ArticleSouth Side View
homage to Johnny Shines blue ribbon of tar runs by my baby’s door where I am bound make a couple of paydays play it tight write: here’s luck you can bell the cat & clip the eagle’s wing sing:...
View ArticleMated for Life
for Amy & Kim Hands are queer things. They can read your fortune in soft loaves fresh from the oven they can trace the invisible lines on a back color in maps of passion they can fly through oceans...
View ArticleInmate at the Academy
my nights never end without pain’s acrid exclamation point my eyelids bagged with the weight of visions piling up like snow canvas is so expensive these days I was the stillborn child: miscarried...
View ArticleThe Democratic Republic of Heaven
1. It’s false, the world we carry inside us like a kernel of unpopped corn in a chicken’s crop, or its twin the grain of gravel, the false tooth. This winter light; the red haze of maple buds beginning...
View ArticleCassandra’s Last Will & Testament
Limits? There are no limits to this life. The cup can be brimming over with pain but there are always more chalices. Don’t speak to me of soil when you mean shit. Don’t exalt sacrifice in the...
View ArticleAfter Word
If it were possible to write a poem that vanished completely from the page as it was read, so that it would last for just a single reading by whoever found it first, her eyes & silent lips...
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