Eventually it comes between us: not the plaster barricade between every tender moment we might have, but the dependence. After the flurry of surgeons and worry of damage there is the carrying of urine, changing of bandage, the creak of crutches and incessant talk of scabs. Like a shabby patch of grass I am stretched … Continue reading
Late afternoon slants, illuminates the worn, white husk of hive and gleams like an incubator bulb on the oval of an egg. This might have been the way I was born to move over my mother and wash from her what was left of painful birth, her legs opened like the old wood cracked with … Continue reading
And what really changed? I slept each night, and each night it was easy, the red-tipped edge of dreams descending into ash. I got a job and friends and lived my life with no distraction. I was happy. My back felt better. I stopped wanting to argue all the time. I read magazines and cereal … Continue reading
This is no act of creation. What has the moth to do with anything? And what have we become in this turmoil of the dark, but selves open, again to wonder? It is only that we missed the weight of flesh. And though we are not always, we are, at least, here, longing, and we … Continue reading
“…how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again…” -James Joyce, Ulysses who let you watch them mornings when they dressed; who sent you up ladders; who left blood in back seats; who skulked across their parents’ … Continue reading
The water keeps leaving the same suicide note behind carved in the rock as it keeps falling over the cliff to its death in the pool below. Continue reading
I wrote B on my calendar to mark the days when you were gone. I’d color each square yellow or blue, careful to go outside the lines. Any film at the Forum, where I could reason the foreign and obscure. You’d arrive on the last day of color carrying tomes. Remember how they broke our … Continue reading
Cosmos pollen loosens over trail shoes, spitfire dragonflies fan the tongue’s ridge. Dust covered with the needle pinned path, sole dyed with the green of smear grass. Zoetic forest, air licked by lizards ferns coated with insect fur, drowning in sound, a cuckoo call ogling frog drops its bulbous lid. Farmed fields caress the calm … Continue reading
I sip trauma like hot tea And eat grief like leftover lasagna cold and stiff from the fridge. I swallow anger like old grapes, I drink pity like milk. Continue reading
I. Now it’s summer in our separate rooms, where in mine night renders the spackled drywall a constellation-like map of your freckles; so does your light make you think of my bellybutton? 2. Doubts. I have them. 3. You said, The sea always drinks the sun, but in the orchard, with myths of Newton and Eve … Continue reading
Coe Review 