Let me tell you something about your son. He misses you. You may know that. I’ve no idea of consciousness besides my own. He misses you so much he sees you alive maybe on an island where you washed up when your boat went down. Maybe you crawled up from the detritus and dead cod and became king of some unmapped Viking island in the North Atlantic. […]
He called her Rhon-diful before the lovemaking because, well, she was Beau-tiful. No lightbulb went off. Maybe it was his good looks or, with heated and/or cooled cupholders, the Escalade. If he’d turned the corner a few times, she’d seen the blackboard ahead. That warning was like a chalked dead-body swinging from every streetlight and stop sign: Rhonda, Run Like a Rabbit. But faster. Of course, she didn’t see anything. […]
I’m Rodin’s Thinker—Le Poète— beside you, full of scotch and silent curses on the steps of Columbia’s Low Library (between the columned facade). I am crying a Fare-You-Well brushstroke. You are dying, no longer the Juicy Fruit of any young boy’s eyes, no Blake’s Lily in my poems. You aren’t going to pirouette on your toes for me tonight, be anyone’s pop-bottle in the orchestra or balconies. Maybe you smell […]
the new flat doesn’t smell like anything, not fresh paint, or cleaner, or previous tenants. never before has dust taken so long to settle. i’m trying to stay here, grounded in the scentless, untouched quiet. but all this kind of moon ever does is throw its many-shadowed blue arms over the floor and, presently, my legs. it is the same moon. then there is the same brick. concrete before […]
Approximation The grandfather points out the witch at the market who comes to buy mushrooms and stare at postcards. She touches the sand dollar wind chimes, retracting her hand as the dry bodies musically crash. She strokes the sharp scales of fish lain in shaved ice, tries to discern the words caught in their gills. She has forgotten the art of existence, the […]
All day I curl up against the wall with black coffee, reading your old copy of Dorian Gray. I wait for December dusk, the top side of the feather duvet frosting my fingertips. Hiding away, I carve this trench in your room, persistent as rain. I push past gossip murmured by these walls, of who else slept in this bed that now holds my body’s shape. […]
Rain taps on the tin roof and I am in an unlit room not thinking of you. The air is cold, not like winter; it feels like your arms when they’re not wrapped across my ribs, your hand curling next to my lips, catching my more quiet breaths. 1:24 AM – the clock sits on the table next to the right side of my bed, where you slept. […]
I forget my reasons for staying, saying instead it’s what’s right– wrong, again. Again, I swallow it all: the anger, the regret. But it won’t stay down, as I do. It rises, likes the hot air you speak, corrodes the ceiling, takes my breath, leaves me gasping, choking on what you could not swallow. The indignant, after all, have no room for their own mistakes. […]
On Preparing For A Date I Don’t Care To Go On I debate with myself how to dress: casually, so as to hint at my lack of interest; or with care, to show him the shape of my body — the one he won’t be touching. Rachel Nix is from Northwest Alabama. Despite an irrational fear of frogs, she’s declared herself pretty content with living in the boonies. […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 