Adaptations A Brindle Afghan disappears, if she can manage to be still, before a backdrop of shrubbery like triggerfish into the sargassum a jaguar into the understory or a human into a plaza, where hundreds are dancing, swaying together or apart, like the tentacles of a sea anemone hypnotic, concealing harpoons.…
I always imagined that when one of our hearts would break, the other’s would shatter too. While my sister Evette and I have two separate hearts, we share a chest, a torso, and a vulva. We share most other things as well — like this one-bedroom apartment on the East side, Pollack prints covering exposed…
“Is the Lack of Daylight Night?” (question asked by Arthur McMaster) Two gunshots in the just-past-twilight mostly-dark: one & then the next. Close enough to startle the brown jack nuzzling grass in a nearby patch yet so distant I can’t determine if those sounds are rifles in the southern woods or they’ve come southeast across…
You don’t want me, and the force of you not wanting me creates a shape; the presence of an absence, like an amputated limb. Here’s the courtyard you aren’t crossing. Here’s the stone step under mossy tree where you don’t sit, pulling me down next to you. You don’t take me to a coffee shop…
I swear I never wrote about you, days spent cleaning, always ironing the sheets and underwear, hours cooking and baking for the freezer, never family. Karen, sly bandito, searched your purse, the cabinets and kitchen drawers. You kept that freezer locked daring anyone to steal your hard work…always, always for people outside…
He has peacock feathers. They stick out just above his butt – blues, greens, purples. They shimmer in the light. I like it most when he dances. The feathers shiver like virgins. I watch him in the anorexic moonlight. Every night. When it rains, snows, when the wind screams, and tonight, when the midnight air…
You are a small potato. Bigger potatoes are dancing to fantastic music in outer space, but you can’t go there. You’re a simpleton blown to bits by the cut and thrust of superior tubers, by the gravity of dancing. Your zen is here in the grocery store, moving through life as a good or service,…
You wake up and already your Verum Anniversarium letter is in your inbox. For twenty years you have waited for this letter, a glimpse into your future…well, probably. Most likely. Eighty-twenty. For weeks now you have been preparing yourself for this moment, deciding what you were going to believe. In just three hours, the truth…