Drop that napkin, let’s let the melting cheese be a call to arms, the tomato bread bowls brimming with promise of more bread under- neath the soup, and your arms Emily, tender with speed as you desperately try not to spill your favorite meal on the baby’s developing bald spot. I will ignore the older … Read more
The first thing I feel is the hair on my stomach dancing under my moving fingertips leading downward to the raised mound of my crotch. Half-sleeping half-waking I could be dreaming. I could pretend this vegetable tube the dimpled sack of balls are foreign to the land between my thighs. I could wish for the … Read more
if someone comes to you with the truth run brush with baking soda drink vodka straight kick low punch high floss floss floss find a job you don’t hate to deter a bully saw stickball bat in half hide in bushes flash attack mercilessly don’t worry pray same shit go to prom escort homeliest girl … Read more
like this: we walked downstream with water like cold breath in our boots and the salmon around us throwing, fighting up to drop their nets of marbles, clementine, go dead and wash down, all flesh, and we meet this way so often— forgetting physics and improbabilities, prayers for … Read more
Plague city shut its gates to keep out or keep in the dead magistrate bricked up in the portal all the living pounding gavels to keep away the Devil the operatic chaos of the chorus typical of the times Richard Carr’s writing has appeared in Poetry East, Exquisite Corpse, New Letters, Painted … Read more
I recognize the black balloons, the same kind used at the office party for my fiftieth birthday. Now sixty, I expected something more creative: black homburgs, melanistic leopards, caviar. I would have settled for farfalla schwarz (black bowtie pasta). Instead, I got first pick from a six-foot sub, Black Forest Ham, and a swig of … Read more
It is a leg, pale white, with golden hairs glowing in the stark lamp light. I touch her skin. I feel the goose pimples of her flesh and am intrigued by the 3 dimensionality of the cuts. I run my fingers along them like ridges on the sand. Up and over the smooth mountains of … Read more
You are sitting in couples therapy. It’s 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday and nothing is out of the ordinary. You and your husband have been seeing this therapist for almost five years and your marriage is solid. Still, you’re talking about how you wish he cared more about the upkeep of the house. As you … Read more
