Category: articles

  • These Artists

    These Artists

    1. Flowing.  You are a pedestrian: you are in enforced imprisonment. This is the phantom you are plagued by. You hear whispers and shouts permeated around the sidewalk that you try to float by in loose motions; sometimes songs bubbled under skin, common sense suggests this resonated in privacy. Like say some kind-a cosmos protocol…

  • Correction

    Correction

    Oh, what will it take for this old heart to be kinder – for me to smile at my mother and say, yes, yes, that’s right when she tells me that the waning moon is waxing.  

  • Untitled

    Untitled

    I.   Sackets Harbor, dead of midnight, August: Three kids at that junction of not believing they are, in fact, kids, lay backs flat on the asphalt of dead quiet Route Three in stunning star-silence.   II.   It could only have been half an hour before our skin was eaten by bugs or we…

  • Antares’ Benediction

    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…

  • I Listened to Schumann

    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  …

  • Antonio & The Avocados

    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…

  • Girls at Yangshuo

    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…

  • Changing the Duvets

    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…

  • Salt-Lick

    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…

  • Key Lime

    Key Lime

    i am the man who strikes his open visage over the vast sea where my grandfather once taught me to fish. He is dead now, and far beyond that sea full of fish lies a great city, where the lights are all shining and it is continuously   storming. In the city there are fish,…

  • Everything Is Stripped These Days

    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…