Listen with your grownup ears. The night may speak to you with silence. The silence of leaves turning. Of a spider’s patience. Silence abiding. The moon shrugs off its silver stole, bright paradigm to let it go— loss, dependence, fear—to take the stars as your guide, the cataclysmic births and deaths, the shy-of-everlasting light, the fatal strength to face the end. We’ve changed since we were children. How many faces […]
All Hallows The air smells black, like burnt matches, like candlewicks. The moon a polished silver doorknob. It’s bitter, a chocolate night. We dance along the street like fallen leaves. Whispers spark and snap from hollow trees. We hear a sound like seeds snickering in the dry heart of a gourd, too late sense that some monstrous thing has taken form and comes clattering behind. From dreams I know […]
Old Cemetery, Owensville, Ohio I said good morning to her every day on my way to school. The rain-flattened engraving kept a century’s secret, on a headstone leaning after too many Midwestern winters. I pretended to know her: “wife of ______”, though she’d long since sifted down to dust and bones beneath the roots of our village. I invented her tragic death, looked for signs, willed her to haunt me. […]
She’s closed the door of her room today, which means you’re being tested. Don’t call through the door, don’t seek to enter by action, word, or thought, the three intentions necessary for sin. Or sit outside and wait; she hates that, tells you you’re a lost puppy. The language you must use evokes intentionality but doesn’t make a specific claim. The steps you take, quietly down the hall, argue you […]
We thought we could pool our loneliness— mine plus yours, addition thus becoming division of emptiness. But ten years later, our handshake deal isn’t enough; zero divided by any number still equals zero. The house suffers our pitiless geometry. We burrow into our separate cells. In acute silence grudges multiply like mice. This is a subtraction that compounds daily. We never mastered that higher branch of mathematics that could make […]
The cost of keeping you, my love, is high. Blue candles worn to nubs, raven-throated nights of chanting, vats of honey to swim your name in are the least of it. To your symbol and substitute, carved poppet, blonde wool wound round waxen neck, I address my prayers and pleas. Each time you falter, your tiny twin, lumpen manikin, assures your return, as long as the levy’s paid. […]
In this digital day and age we must embrace all of the promotional platforms available to us in order to promote our art and/or the art of others. We would therefore like to present those whom we accept for publication with the opportunity to have their work featured on the popular online art community called deviantART regardless of whether or not the poet has an existing dA account, with no […]
—the times I slept alone, dreaming my slack body over you, your winged shoulders spread, your back carried the weight of my body— the heavy weight of the horizon. My trembling hands translated your form into a winged Assyrian bull, a support of my desire, as a figure of myth, circling, or a broken recording: Beethoven’s sonata number fourteen, opus twenty-seven in an endless loop, coursing through the blood, in […]
Some mornings, after an hour’s run, after a slight shower, I reconsider my body, still damp with steam in the bathroom mirror, glowing with a persistent light. The skin gains a halo, a quality that almost seems religious, as a self-portrait by Schiele, reds and greens accenting the lines of the form, a figure framed in self reflection, in the blur of early hours, when time becomes an old man […]
I cannot justify my wanting you still, even to myself, even on days like this, when I wander, lost in a haze of past lives. Was it nineteen o’ two or in nineteen twenty when we first met seven years before my grandmother’s birth? Under remote bridges you hesitantly let me kiss you, a calculated risk worth chancing among the needles, used condoms but no, that was nineteen […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 