I am angry that I have never woken up And not known how I got there, That I have never disappeared in the dead of night And stayed missing for days on end. I am angry that I have a heart Prone only to aches and emptiness And not that savage flaming … Continue reading
A distant shelterbelt of cottonwoods boils at the edge of a cornfield that waits to be cut for silage. Arid gusts rattle withered corn leaves ringing with the screaks of red-legged locusts. Ladybird beetles cling to the wild roses that stagger down the slopes of empty ditches. An old woman toddles past the empty barn … Continue reading
Bathe me in ale, soak me in froth, Give rivers of whiskey to swim in; No time for women when rum is on tap, And oceans of beer on the side. Fill me with collops and gobbets of flesh, Stay me with flagons of wine. Give me to gnaw on glutinous gristle And I’ll … Continue reading
And in those days the ptarmigan will become as white as driven snow … Stirs a few speckled ovals @ high elevation and promises shell-shock, survival. Each egg is as seismic as it gets inside a world of dwarf willows, lichens, mosses — moorland fruit. And, then, in a split- … Continue reading
Hay una constelación sobre sus sábanas enormes Suficientes para acoger un cadaver de gigante Alguien me dijo que No sabemos aquí, en occidente Lo que es un gigante Pero enseguida rió y de su boca salieron rosas, Llenas de espinas recorriendo los tallos, Para llegar a mis pies There is a constellation on … Continue reading
A man alone in a midnight tavern a hundred miles out of Paris thinks of a dancer in Carcassonne a Sunday stabbing in Place Pigalle hears wind gaining through the Marne the evening’s unmapped road of truant voices insomniacs and drunks pilfering their own sleep mandolins lighting ballads in unlit corners and his mother rising … Continue reading
So what is the antithesis of strawberry is not strawberry? I’m inclined to say it’s ash, if only to impress upon you the more practical theory of how a thing is often gotten at in getting at what it’s not. How you encouraged these bubbles to fettle my nose reciting the méthode … Continue reading
That the tongue is often mistaken for the body’s strongest muscle is no surprise. I have a friend who might well heft to the tomb the weight of every word spoken to him. If pressed he might recast us to the womb, replay labor’s caterwaul, the intermittent intercom of mask-dappled voices. How the cava … Continue reading
You live in the city; in the snow outside paw-prints crisscross the lawn. You wonder if the other animals ever get lonely. Sometimes you feel like an Eskimo out on an ice floe caught without a fishing pole when it’s too cold to swim back. Art’s a type of entertainment, a diversion from … Continue reading
Some days you let yourself think what it might be like, how you might just be standing there on the corner of Third and Main not thinking about anything in particular and you’d just keel over. Maybe there’d be just a split second of being dizzy, lightheaded, a sudden familiar fragrance, and that would be … Continue reading
Coe Review 