a table is set in the middle of an image of the high plains. clouds white and clouds purpling sit at the wide horizon. low roll of timpani. the table is covered in white billowing in wind caught like the hem of a dress caught like hair unpinned. there are grasses in hummocks clear to the heavy sky. on the table a heavy candelabra black weighs down the shroud white […]
A blindfold; glass apothecary jars full of pumpkin guts, stringy and viscous, slippery seeds and shavings like bits of flesh; oiled spaghetti slick as worms deep in crepuscular earth and long as nightmares; peeled grapes, mucilaginous sclerae, vitreous humors collected by some mutant monster skilled with a blade. Children hover their hands over the openings, hesitant, their smiles tight and battling cringe. Whisper ghost stories under sheet-draped tables, faces […]
Your grandmother loved me from the day we met but not enough. She told you you should keep me, as though a Boy Scout badge, something to put in a shoebox or sew with thin stitches onto your sash. Keep her. I wasn’t repelled by her stories of viscera, of reaching into the red cavity, gripping the muscle, squeezing when it wouldn’t, reminding it of purpose, meaning. The bones […]
On a whim, we drove to Vegas and lost everything but the three-fifty stashed in the glovebox for the breakfast buffet. The red pleather booths and geometric orange and brown pockmarked paint reminded me of the Sambo’s my dad used to love. I told you, and you snorted. “That place! They shut it down.” Your barrel chest, soft around the edges as it has always been, shook the warped linoleum […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 