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
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
A blue whistling thrush swoops from behind Palavi’s kutir, Hindi for cabin, anytime we step out. We know of women from Kausani who carry large baskets of rice shoots on their heads, their bodies thin and straight as pines spread in these Himalayan foothills. They wear saris vermillion, turquoise, chartreuse or midnight blue as the … Continue reading
No satined-ceiling basement room for me. Let my flesh be cleanly burned away, my bones returned to dust and ash. Swept from the retort, ground fine, shards of bone released from recognition. My artificial joints mourn magnetic removal. After all, they stepped in when movement was too painful for my body to bear. Though … Continue reading
Subdue me with robin’s egg glow blind me with the neverending scroll in the dark under my pillow monsters can’t find me here and maybe I’ll stop listening to whispers if I cram a fistful of guitars in my ear nevermind they come from my mind I can’t stuff a sock in my … Continue reading
Coe Review 