Her dough-tipped fingers sparrow another pale moon into fullness as a giant beast clouds the thicket of bamboo upon its back with steam. Enough heat can turn a lake into air, the sea into some memory of having once held breath underwater.

When I need my mother most I climb inside my mouth turn left at my incisor teeth turn right at the ghosts of both my grandfathers and find her dancing under the chandelier of my uvula.

Touch them, the tesserae, the shards of floating glass, which skim the rain-full gutter. Not dead: us/them—mere stutters, gluttons for new skin. Life, peel back your veil. Now, see? See it again: To be dead another time is a deciduous explosion.

You know where this is going: Danny lives across the street, house number 32-25 to my 32-26, and he is eight years to my seven;

Drunk Bitch dreams of a luminous stream / & pisses herself. Drunk Bitch drops her drink in the lap / of a slightly less drunk body & is sure she's found love / in his smiling shrug

At Night, By Myself                         —for Xiaobo life plays its bleak tunestedious, gloomydaylight without light a rice bowl drops on the floora…

Once, a long time ago, I knew a guy named Martin who did not like to be called Marty, though I'd heard another man, Charles, who himself allowed people to call him Chuck, call him Marty on several occasions.

At 1am, 2am, the across-the-road-guy decides to start shooting stuff. Cans or nothing maybe. Ten shots each time. After each ten you think he's all out.…

I see the moon—flickering, broken leaning against the sky—and am afraid.

this once-heretical root, domesticated / for latkes. My calendar's terribly reduced.

Here is something we have learned time and again: you need not love everything. You do not have to devote yourself to what you thought you’d enjoy. You can decide, whenever you like, that what you feel is no kind of love.

The morning of Claire's funeral, I lie naked on the table and wait for her mourners to arrive. Thomas scrapes a knife against whetstone in the kitchen. When he appears above me, the blade glints harsh in his hand. It's all I can see. To minimize the pain, he explains with a paternal smile. I smile too.

He had kept the bulk of his music library, which covered every genre from obscure Sub-Saharan drum tracks recorded on cell-phones to honey-tongued R&B to Norwegian black metal, in his parents' basement. It was the only place, he had argued, that could support the weight of it all.

Was that season artery or vein? when the days stretched like Broadway, & the nights undid our shirts – the temperature so slight you could raise your arms in flight & feel nothing, the body as air. But there was also the need for hurt. And dusk: a ghost of a boy tempted to feel his weight, to put his palm to the depth, touch the pupil, the dead turbine of god’s one good cataracted eye.

It was six o'clock in the morning when I started collecting clocks, and now it's 9:37. 10:37. I mean it's 10:00cm. These clocks are all wrong. Time is spilling out of them and getting everything. . . getting everything. . . that word when the clothes are on the floor and crumbs are in your bed and you've spilled wine and yelled at George.

Two sides of what used to be one wooden box hang on the walls of the Smart Gallery in Chicago. At first glance they are unremarkable: vaguely Italian-looking landscapes populated by two vaguely Italian-looking lovers, all flowing hair and slit silk. In the panel on the left, a woman lies improbably across some rocky ground—perhaps sleeping or dead—while a man leans on his staff and peers over her with a neutral expression. In the panel on the right, in front of a section of silvery sea, the same woman stands apart from the man who reaches toward her. His mouth is open. Her hands cross upwards into two woody stems and blossom into the unmistakable broccoli-floret silhouette of a tree: Daphne, turning into a laurel to escape the god Apollo.

The old men are unsure. Something is twisting up and up to become a stair. And what is the end for? Who would stop here and dream such accumulations? Once…

On the day I was born, the air was a supple stew—heavy with overripe fruit and armpits, ocean salt, and slow-roasted goat meat. Of course, I don’t remember that day, but I was born in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam—just ‘Dar’ to the locals—and the viscosity of the air is the first thing that visitors remark on. It is what they remember most.

The job description was accurate: Assistant Needed for Commercial Body Modification Project was what it read, and Sherilyn was excellent at assisting, having done it most of her life.

& after the first course, your corsage flatlines Beautiful convulsions Then, it sprouts wings, thorns, claws its way up your arm to swallow you goosebump by goosebump

He stared down the neck of the guitar like a rifle sight. The shelves in the glass case between us were lined with switchblades, laptops, engagement rings and arrowheads. A small fan on the counter blew only on the clerk. BEWARE: GUARD FERRETS, said a sign taped to the side of the register.

St. Christopher strides across the river. Both hands grip a walking staff bracing him against the current, his calf muscles flexing as fish swirl about his legs. He is looking up at the infant Christ perched birdlike on his right shoulder. This is perhaps the moment in which the Saint, who does not yet know the identity of the child, is said to ask Him, “Why are you so heavy?” and Christ answers, “Because I bear on my shoulders the weight of the world.”

I am the woman who the writer could not earn enough money to see. He never finished the stories, nor the political articles. He never arrived on the train, we never stayed at the hotel. We were dating at a time when I hated the idea of old age. In other words, I was happy.

His skin was peeled in so many places, you can’t recognize the color of his hair, but when you view the rest of the tufts on his forehead, one could say it was just normal brown…He was ancient, and had spent his years in one of the alleys: skirmishing with other neighborhood dogs, tricking the butcher in order to snatch a bone from between his legs, and in the short, pleasurable moments, pursuing the traces of females or besieging a cat by a certain wall when…

& then the erotic self begun. The pink parts shut-up in the eternal & the jealous. Obsidian unfurls its wet petals. Composure divine, as a crown of snakes’ synchronized uncoiling witnesses the male animal become marble.

an exercise in mining the worst possibilities from the ridges / of the brain absent of stalagmitic reach