issue 3

Despairathon

You’ve spent a lifetime training
for this.

A Beautiful Thing

I want to roll in this moment until I become its vocabulary
until I smell like the bones
until I am its echo…

The Drift

And then he feels that familiar sensation of drifting—when his body untethers from the material world and he soon dissolves into a fine, floating mist that evaporates into the atmosphere.

Darkness always follows.

Post Pregnancy Examination (Shortened Form)

Infant’s Name: A
Delivery Date: August 1, 2002

Unerased | Steep Steps

My grandmother asked, “Does it feel like being widowed?”

My Multiverses

It is the 70s. 1970s? 2570s? Who knows?
Audre and I have a penthouse in New York.

appetites

you quit wearing pants
loaf around your yard
in hole-nipped panties

Vase

The storm passes without snow.
The car waits loyally in the back lot.

Letter To a Young Poet

Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”

The Final Fruits

My mother has been dead for two hundred and forty-three days. I’ve had plenty of things in my refrigerator for longer.

I Garden at the Edge of Autumn

There is so little left of the tomato plants.

Pop Trompe L’oeil

Still life all the time inspired by scenes of domestic life.

Snow Falls from Branches

Should have found a job by now; should have slept in the night;
should have boiled old coffee before noon.

Black Ghosts of Ponderosa on a Silhouette of Hill

Even as the sun warms the concrete
the long nights’ sensual cold lingers in my clothes.

Dear Deer in the Compost Pile

I tap at the alphabet while a single deer
taps at the dirt beyond the brush
on the far side of the tree line.

A Way of Seeing

Just starlight and some small scribbling across vinyl.

Your Glass Mouth

A tortured simper uncoils itself across my mouth as I open another bottle of Penis wine.

Clueless & Briefly Gorgeous

I buy too much, for someone of my stature.
could pawn a skinny metaphor to purchase a plump skin.
its reputed in our lineage— to daydream a life that shreds our pockets.

The Rift

None speak of how the streets collide in coarse seams like scars, the fresh cobbles unable to level with the ones shaken from their mortar by uncountable seasons.