in memory of my cousin, Finn O’Neill We can begin the process of brushing Hong Kong from our shirt folds As it flakes into our wonderful Futureless past. Some kind Remark you made on my elegance Really stuck with me & I’d like to think Everything changed, but nothing Ever really does. That’s so tired … Continue reading
Should we cater a bar mitzvah? We settle for peanut butter pupcakes, pumpkin-bacon crisps. Little need for a fog machine. It’s no birthdate, after all, no anniversary of arrival— just an arbitrary day on the calendar, chosen to assuage our ten-year-old, now eighteen and away at school. Eighteen! That’s forty-six thousand dog days, nested inside … Continue reading
Night walks on its hands, comes juggling bowling balls and chainsaws. Night arrives hissing in a skillet, smelling of beer and catfish, has yet to meet the box fan since its argument with wind. Night comes when we least expect it, before crickets and sunsets, before clean plates, before wine. The lonely dining room table, … Continue reading
Weariness, I feel you coming on big legs, mascara running, boar’s breath fogging windows as you lean on my door. Sleeplessness, I see you pulse behind my eyes, electricity split between body and mind. Restlessness, I smell your sharpshooter bent among bluebells. (What more should I say?) It’s not all boo-hoo in the borough. The … Continue reading
From sunrise to sunset wet-suited bobbins float offshore. Tsunami Zone warnings adorn the dips and rises of the park roads that lead to the long reach of sand. How do those surfers choose? They might say they are looking for promises of a religious experience. Don’t we all believe at some point, impossible to remain … Continue reading
They looked exactly the same— the blue tension, the hall, the floor, almost magically wrapped in lush. Thrones seated sarcasm, too fast, legs trembling. Punch-drunk intuition somehow grinned and I love I love I love— all too high. I want to get down, throw laughter to its feet. Joints pop, hands … Continue reading
(a museum docent speaking) The mapmakers must have let magical thinking guide their work, hearsay and conjecture shaping the newfound lands to match their desires and fears. Just look at these illustrations, how they construe an interior replete with precious metals, cannibals, chimeras, and rough beasts. Some cartographers, following Columbus, located Eden, the lost Garden, … Continue reading
Once again, the Douglas Fir is hauled out of the basement, a steerage muscled, drug through narrow confines of the sheet-metal furnace and the squat, empty cavity of the deep-freeze that hasn’t been filled with butchered goodies since Skogland’s Meat Locker went bankrupt in ’09. Verdant synthetics are then pulled apart, sectioned to maneuver the hard … Continue reading
(after the nursery rhyme) Born on Monday The midwife, watching for signs in the stars, declares the time has come; it cannot be otherwise. Neighbor folk fill the room with flowers, and when at last the water breaks they jerk the drunken father awake and send him to buy blessings from the priest. … Continue reading
I. The middle-aged Russian, bare-and-barrel-chested, asleep in the bed next to me in a hostel in Lisbon screams at midnight about his lost passport clutched in his hand like a Bible. II. 4 AM. 2nd date. 2 long-empty wine bottles stand like rooks on the table guarding nothing but trepidation. You in pajamas, tired in … Continue reading
Coe Review 