Lose CountFrom the Print
Now she reached her fingers sleepily over the side of the bed, grabbed the first of Eli’s small thrashing arms that she encountered, held it for a moment as a type of greeting. What time was it?
Fiction & Poetry
Tough BeautyFrom the Print
They’re covered in their secret sitting and being calmly dark featured, and their history is a thing blood kept, but in their historical minds nothing but landscapes or bloodbaths, how can I know?
“I’ll No Longer Be Born Today” & Other PoemsFrom the Print
We wanted to make Mama’s insides beautiful,
to make her more beautiful,
to show slides—
so we installed an overhead projector there
(you can’t imagine how we managed)
and endeavored to project the world on her insides.
The South of FranceFrom the Print
The stuff was thick. It was denser today, and so when Trimble dropped his key card outside his office door, it was not swallowed up like so many before it. Instead it rested on the surface, with its magnetic strip down…
WashingtonFrom the Print
… Erasing, blurring
and blowing. We’re marking
forever. Get this.
I am recording you.
I will keep you in my gut.
the cars are stalled.
Zounds the trucks. Litter and
it will hurt.
KarstFrom the Print
After the trucks depart, Clint faxes me: How long have you been peeking in our windows? I heard you weeping in the landscaping. You woke her up…
Ghost Mountain Island Murder MysteryFrom the Print
When beetles crawled out of my mouth, I closed my eyes and let them scuttle away. She stayed near the water. She ran her toe through the sand and watched the water smooth the rut…
"Invocation"From the Print
Bring the huge vernacular. / Bring trysts of jealous / gods and a girl changed into a tree / and the tree, bring it / back or forward into / the foreseeable quantum dawn / shielding opalescent fog…
Lampedusa BeachFrom the Print
“What do we do, my children and I, the days with no food?”
Mahama responded:
“Have the first one leave, have her leave on a day with no food.
Those who remain will watch her set out,
it will be their duty to cry.
When the heart suffers there is no hunger.”
FeatsFrom the Print
Emmett could neither defend himself nor keep from growing sicker with every blow, his blackened eyes scanning the distance for a horizon by which to orient himself as his father cried and struck…
The Sadness of Tycho Brahe's MooseFrom the Print
So first of all not a moose exactly.
An elk.
But what an elk.
Moose-like in its magnificence…
"Stupid Petals" & Other PoemsFrom the Print
Remark the comparative zip and panache / of those beautiful hammerhead sharks. / Farther down we get into reptiles, / the “bucket of mud club”…
"The Snob" & "Try"From the Print
She watched a boy on the bus with his knee up under his chin. Some people might think the boy would be worried that he was ill-fitted for his undiscovered future, that he already had something like a belief in his own failure…
West of the KnownFrom the Print
My brother was the first man to come for me. The first man I saw in the raw, profuse with liquor, outside a brothel in New Mexico Territory…
"Sedna Married" & Other PoemsFrom the Print
Unhappily it pleased her to take up / with the village dog, having found neither the man / with the biggest canoe nor the man / with the keenest fishing-spear to her tastes…