Category: articles
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Her Journey
– for Charla Two brown eyes, framed by spraysof pine needles, stared, blinked. The fawn lowered her head. This is a once-in-a-life, she thought,as she lifted the camera to her eye.The camera strap rustled, and the deer bolted. Her mama quickly herded heraway. In the viewfinder the focusingdots nervously flickered trying to find those eyes.…
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Like A Dog
“Let her strike me, it relieves her heart… it’s better that way.” –Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky I’ll show for her my trick And yet will come the scolding.I will endure her kick For the prize she is withholding. She’ll pet my spotted mane For sitting near in silence;I’ll speak one word untame And surely…
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i think my grandma’s going to die
Butterflies only live for two weeks and the fruit fly lives for a day. I’ve never left the country. Snails can sleep for three years and shrimps keep their hearts in their heads. I don’t like my name. I detest my smile. And the footprints on the moon will live for a hundred million years.…
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In the Junk Shop
Filed in this black box of smoky negatives, parents, children, grandparents,aunts and uncles all gussiedup for Easter, the wornporch steps and sagging,moldy gutters behind them. And the toothy birthday girl, the erstwhile boyfriends in bow ties, the fresh shine of a large-mouthed bass, Christmas smiles set glowing by bubble lights. And I am the one…
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REFORGED MATRIMONY
After his divorce from Aphrodite,Hephaestus, lame god of the forge,re-wed Aglaea, goddess of beauty.She was the youngest of the Three Graces,and it was her job to attend to Aphrodite. Conspicuous in garment of the groom,Hephaestus paces the halls, limping.Aglaea, gargling in the bathroom,will take several more hours primping.Heph slaved at his forge so she’d be…
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The Empties and the Infinites
There are those who carry worlds within, walking obituaries,unable to place,unable to recollect,names which might codicil reason.Their aversions and tendenciesall cross-haired into a mad conglomerate,at sixes and sevens, they wander.Arms splayed,to catch walls and deflect voices,screaming reminders of who they were,before they left,before they leapt,God said they wouldn’t make it into heaven.And there are those,stein-eyed…
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sorry
i just wanted to say sorry,for kicking the legs on your chairout from under youwhen you were sitting down for dinner, for holding the pillow down on your facewhen you lay in bed to sleep. i hope you don’t mind my apologizing,for cutting the cold water in your showerin the hopes that you might burn…
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A Good Night to Hunt
(The Cliffs of Bamiyan, 2228 A.D.) Musa shielded his eyes from the light of the slowly setting sun, scanning the skies for the falcons that hunted overhead. Two or three still wheeled lazily, high up in the sky, but they would be settling in to roost soon. He adjusted the leather satchel that he carried…
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Harvest
The thin man in an ill-fitting, ragged black suit arrived silently by nightwith an entourage beyond sight. At high noon the next day, out on the edge of town, just beyond where First Street veers into Old Highway and disappears to places no one has ever been, the man and his Church of Truth’sTraveling Gospel…
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The Weight of Pine Trees
It doesn’t take long for his brother to die. There’s nothing particularly dramatic about it either- a cough coloured red, a shudder and an endless quiet as pale as the snow that falls on us. I’ve seen it all before. The tang of death doesn’t hold the same metallic heaviness it used to. I suppose…
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Black Sonnet: The Great He-Goat
On Francisco Goya’s painting of the same name. He half-faced me, one square eye on the crowdOf mourners, one fastening me. He claimed,Pain is the elixir of eternity.So paint your features black, shriek out the soundOf widow wails who clave until fate claveAway, waft the rot of society,That smell of burning waste, lick the groundWhose…
