Category: creativity
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The Deep End
My swim trunks flow like algae,under & entrenchedby sterile blue shifts) The once-great sky cavernsinto rapt chlorine gates: The Deep End,where is it? Widening curves warp our towninto nill-lands oblique I have no ground to stand on,the pool holds me helpless— ‘til Death collectsthis daredevilwater-lung &exhausted.
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Post-Pink
Tasted true love discretely, professedas headlong prose,doing all we could & what we liked. The rain fell early— Post-pink; we’ve gone through this;on a mound of fog,raising my hat to the diamond, I wanted more. Dawn sewed through chainlink,aloft like heaven’s gate, Hope kicks hard; there is easehere knowing— I cannot find your name.
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The Old Neighborhood in Winter, A Villanelle
The marriage, the move, my divorce,Lovers come and gone, the children grownNow on city streets of joy and tears I walk alone. Some bungalows and Tudors in renovation,Others with lamp-lit windows where memories are sownMarriage, the move, my separation. I do not shed nostalgia, or weep at daysGone by. My memories are honed.These city streets…
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Altars in the Dwellings of Memories
The images I have submitted materialize a psychological landscape of otherness and memory crisis. As a child of the Cuban Revolution during the Special Period, a time of extreme economic adversity, I have conflicted feelings about my idealized childhood in Cuba as opposed to the country’s current reality and uncertain future. Through drawings, sculpture and…
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O’Hara
Love, be sick as I am sick.Hold the door for a stranger.Tell it to the chicken hawkone thousand miles away. Hesitate and let the wind pinchthat blanket of sawdust we lefton our patio. Who even rememberswhat we were trying to build? Lift me, as you lift the sky,and I will still choose to lay my…
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Jenny Holzer’s Instagram
At the top of a staircase in the Tate Modern, one of the walls is covered in bright colours and contradictory texts. Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays (1979-82), plastered across this wall, serves as a sort of introduction to the rooms just along the corridor that house a selection of some of Holzer’s most well-known work.…
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Meet a Girl at a Bar
You meet a girl at a bar. Here’s how it goes. You came for the gig straight after work because that’s your deal. You work, listen to some music, sleep, repeat. Sometimes you don’t eat but you do your three albums a day like musician does practice. So you go to the gig. Alone. Like…
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Ardent Spirit
This afternoon I’ll help my friend’s dog dieA malamute, husky, shepherd mix she named Sky.I met him first in the high desert 10 years agoHis shift from stray to pet was rocky and slow.He jumped the fence to roam the brushChasing jackrabbits under stars’ milky hush.Dogs who run every moment risk deathBut those who do,…
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Night
I hear the laughter, and I think sometimes the whispers, of ancient Native American children late some nights when I’m sitting on my back porch smoking cigs. This is not some tired stab at the Southern Gothic supernatural. I mean this is Oxford, one of the birthplaces of American Gothica, but I’ve already used two…
