O (After Hamlet)
And, like a neutral to his will and matter, / Did nothing. The engine of your interval ranges blank across the hour. Blank along an inkblack importuning. A blankness rising like a little light. Blank blank my heart, blank my will and matter. These breathing clouds. Brightback the bodies of …
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balcony birds
blue-yellow mouth. uproarious birdsong morning. yesterday a mockingbird landed on the balcony. last month it was a pigeon. a construction crew is digging-up the street. the birds are louder, still. love-rotten morning. without you what’s the point. there’s leftover seed on the balcony. the feeder you made never brought a …
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little lie
he told a lie so small that the fabric of spacetime tore in a corner of his one-bedroom. he didn’t think much of it: there it was, dishonest sliver full of histories and futures, pulsating with starlight. whatever, he coughed, straight into the eternal depths of the hole. one day, …
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Suture Means Thread
With delicate spider silk we’re threaded together, though you are dead, and I am here feeling your burn in my right hip. It’s a protest song—the one you screamed as they rushed you to your death. Or the one your daughter hollered as she tried, tried to get there but …
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A Thing Not Kept
On the trail together, my husband hands me a piece of quartz that I examine then plunk back into the creek. It sounds like a fish gulping. At the bridge, the grandmother does not follow her family down to the river. She has been there before, has seen its coffin-shaped …
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Navigating
Listen: I could tell you the places I’ve been, the waters between. I could tell you of ocean after ocean, of boats like those quaint wooden ones people long ago must’ve trusted to ferry them through gorgeous, deadly distance. … The sort of day I merely exist, rain …
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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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Key Change
Buddy drives and I ride shotgun. We ride in a ramshackle van with busted fenders and peeling paint, the kind of vehicle that inspires parents to hold their kids tight when it staggers too close on the street. We are driving up the coast and the ocean is wide and …
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