Category: articles
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Antares’ Benediction
Reeves loved Antares, seven hundred times the size of our sun, the giant red star in the constellation Scorpius. Five hundred and fifty light years away sounds like a lot but only when constrained by gravity. The distance shrinks to nothing when freed by death, the opposite of gravity, serving as a celestial catapult to…
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I Listened to Schumann
1. Last night in the dark I listened to Schumann, I listened and took notice of my listening. In the house adjacent this, a man and wife had built a fire, and while I listened to my listening I heard their children scream with such delight I’d never heard: in orange …
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Antonio & The Avocados
San Diego, 1974 Is this enough? he asked his mother, wishing the pits were baseballs, the bruised skin of those on the counter his father’s skin. All along 10th Avenue the world was erupting & without perimeter. The mound of them shone moon-yellow on a lavender tray. Enough, Antonio, & now you play…
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Girls at Yangshuo
Before the boats were built we sat on trees felled by storm and made songs for the river. My sisters came and we laughed at what we wore, our confusion and skin. There were no synonyms. When the elders arrived, the fires burned on and Kwa-Sun used a leaf to wipe her lips…
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Changing the Duvets
I’ve accepted that I cannot control the gloomy chaos in my sons’ lives now that their father and I have decided to divorce. This is a huge step for me. Still, my boys deserve to know comfort—specifically the mind-altering experience of lying under a perfectly made bed. But first, I must get rid of those…
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Salt-Lick
the earth will deliver a long and timeless death to the hunter, return to his oiled gun, and the deer, return to the leaves, and the leaves, return to the dirt, urgent under this torturous moon, all of these boots encrusted with mud, urgent again under these torturous stars, fifteen years of crying, fifteen years…
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Everything Is Stripped These Days
Peeled away to the bare core. Everything is inside and shrunken. All I see and hear and think is only what I touch. And taste has nothing to do with any of it. I’m tasteless. What I mean is, I’m not ill but still this virus has me in its grip. The world is shut…
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Dust Pneumonia, 1937
When my brother died, I stuffed his shoes with newspaper to make them fit I think of him when I wear them His lungs, always weak on the baseball field Couldn’t take it. They filled up like flour sacks OklahomaTexasKansasColorado Topsoil turned turgid all over the plains Invading him We played soldiers…
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SIDE VIEW OF THE TEMPORAL REGION
We martians had it all figured, a series of canals traversing the whole planet. A way to move…
