Lohk Kee Kahingey — what will people say
mother—stretched and looming her face like a canvas above my bed a frozen mirror bathing me in guilt pulling her daughter to places so many places I don’t want to go but that never matters because lohk kee kahingey if we don’t show up nodding happy hanging sad carefully matching …
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Snow on Old Parishville Road, 1974
Most winter nights, my friend and I walked the lean back roads that curved and dipped away from town until we’d left campus lights behind. We walked past empty fields, past farms where ramshack meadows, ripe in summer with second growth, lay stilled by snow. We did not mind that …
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Reflection
Hours I’ve spent in river-smelling bathrooms, panning the glass for a hint of gold. Hating what was only light. Even my cat, when held to a mirror, knows that he isn’t in it, will pour nonplussed from my arms. It was harder for me to understand: the woman was representative. …
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I <3 Loss
When I was eleven my mom said you’re so invisible, you should be a drug dealer. From then on, I knew I would be hard to get. I’ve been twenty-one for three weeks. My friend poked the word lucky into my wrist with a spare needle last night. I feel …
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Poseidon
My father demonstrated his power under the YMCA shower head, arms sharpened into points. Water rushed over fins, down fingertips in jets. At bedtime, he rocked me, a ship on calm seas as we sang the old songs. When he grew archaic—hurricanes. Kitchen chairs thrown, explosions into kindling. Blue sky …
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Unfinished Litany
Today I read a report, and the legend attached to its registry of names: threatened, endangered, extinct—and the giddy blur of the boy I was at twelve sundered me with his distant bliss of killing jars and pins, his trawling nets above the zinnias where hairstreaks and skippers caught the …
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Sketch on a Hotel Napkin
I was stuck inside the second person and didn’t have time for anyone, wandering through the intersection of this and that, there and the other way of saying the mind is a magician that improvises its act as it goes on: you, posing for a photograph to resist the inevitable …
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The Dead Cat on the Side of the Road: An Ode
I didn’t cry when I saw it, the dead hair matted back with blood and muddy rainwater. I should have cried, hid my eyes from the upturned lip, the chipped fang and black-ocean pupils frozen in gutterworn rage— the sorts of hollow, holy things that we aren’t meant to see. …
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Sometimes when the news comes on
I bend it into a bow like a ribbon, not a weapon for shooting arrows. I knot it, not it, like kind of when you bend me, I mean, my mind, how when I think I know what I want to say, I don’t. Like that time you bought me …
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How to Make a Cake to Conquer Anxiety
This time, open the bag of flour instead of trying to hide behind it. This time, break the eggs without crying for the birds that were never born. The frosting is sweet, which is how life is, sometimes. The frosting is sweet, which is how life isn’t, many times. Try …
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