Every time I kiss you I think about the history of your mouth, your first kiss, the way your lips must have felt, and what other lips felt like to you. Then I think of all the people you have kissed, the lovers, romances, mistakes. I imagine them all kissing you while I am kissing … Read more
When my mother died, Easter was just a few squares away. The day felt like a porcelain basket of fruit dropped to the ground. A thousand bottles of red wine flowed across the living room floor and I felt the miscarriage begin of the child I had carried my entire life. I became someone without … Read more
Understand that everyone bathes differently. When you’re fat and in a bath, every movement becomes an event, and every event occurs on the surface. This is not Shamu’s pool, and though you wish to dive, to flatten yourself under water, to decrease the amount of curvage peaked above, realize it will prove impossible. You are … Read more
Shampagne we swiped from Meeks’ Country Store wasn’t champagne at all, but white grape juice, Welch’s, in a single serve bottle with a stained label, but out in the mid-seventies dark, running plowed-under tobacco fields, sparklers sputtering in our hands, we pretended, boasted, toasting each other as we passed the bottle between us, dirty-faced dreamers … Read more
And there was no dance, no holy place from which we were absent. ~Sappho Talk me down, if you can. There is so much to be dangerous about. There is that knowing that has shimmered just beyond me as long as I can remember, disarticulated light, shivers like streetlight glimmers on a hotel window. Below, … Read more
They never understood you either. Demure, elegant, reserved—their power always seemed to emanate from a far field you never ventured out to. Early, before they ended it abruptly, you would show up suddenly with a six pack of Coors and a bucket of chicken, knocking at their undented door. You laughed, belching, and said see … Read more
Amusement Park I work for Kabul’s amusement park. At first, I met with merchants who gave food when I gave in. And you might say we bartered in the black bazaar of Kabul. What must I do when my small girls go to the school in socks, in dirt, no bread? To sell my meat … 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
It is only that today is trash day. I hoped you would remember. Time to remove. We used to call it the dump. Back your truck up to the pile and fling your trash at the mountain. People went there to see the bears. Rummage. To see each other. On a Saturday morning, I found. … Read more
I pull on my heavy boots and an old sweatshirt. I haven’t walked in the woods since Thanksgiving, when the ground was still warm enough to melt the Canadian snow. It is half past Easter now – technically spring, actually winter. I crunch through islands of snow, slip on hidden ice, sink nearly a centimeter … Read more
Praise be! The man at the end of the bar wore a suit and tie. Red, of course. There were no flowers but it didn’t matter. I thought of flowers and my mother who died last December but it didn’t matter. I thought of a Regime across the ocean which believed it was OK to … Read more
There is something about my echo, something of which I cannot let go. In that I hold my tongue to my lips, listening, snake-like to what is amiss. The end of echos can never be reached, grabbed, acquired, or touched. My fingertips yearn for that moment in which it can collide into remnants of sound. … Read more
Lania D’Agostino D’Agostino Studios, llc http://dagostinostudios.com/ You show me a new painting, part of a dream. A pink ribbon runs across the top, cutting off a giraffe’s head. The giraffe has green wheels on its feet. With its head turned, curious, it resembles the Skin Horse. Bubbles float in the opaque air, part of the watery … Read more
Maybe it’s time for a story. This time it’s a stone that does it. I pick it up. It is smooth and wet. Are there only two kinds? Jagged or smooth. Sometimes we say this side or that side, but there are infinite dimensions. To all of us. Boy or a girl, it makes no … Read more
—You are still definitely looking for his approval. Your dad’s I mean, I said. —Nah. —You are. You sat down at your parents’ kitchen table and told your dad you’d bought that record on vinyl. On vinyl. That’s because you care. I sat back in the chair and waited. He would come up with some … Read more
Up at the cabin, Bill O’Reilly demonstrates how to spread gravel. Up at the cabin, a rainbow trout learns to swallow young women fishing from the bank. Up at the cabin, thunder storms flood our shoes if left on the steps. Up at the cabin, an ornithologist wearing khaki pants and shirt grows eagle talons … Read more
hood of blank sky a white man dragged
behind a ford wrists tied to a strong rope
in the truck cab two men drink rainier
beer the wailings of jimi hendrix drown
out the screams of the dying man
they bury him above a riverbank two
deer watch silently chewing leaves with
blank glassy eyes skeletal white bodies
of streamside cottonwoods standing in
careless witness as the final shovel-
fuls of wet earth are tossed on the pale
limp body
When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them. They would carry on as if changing the locks was a game all parents played with their oldest child, to trick them into resiliency. They let my little sister have my bedroom one day while I was at school, to … Read more
A Braided Essay Australian adult Cane Toads are heavily-built amphibians with dry warty skin. They have a bony head and bony ridges that meet above the nose and eyes. Large swellings – the parotoid glands – are located on each shoulder. All stages of the Cane Toad’s life-cycle are poisonous. The venom produced by the … Read more
CHARACTERS Carmen Hamilton – Late thirties Carman’s father, Franklin – Early sixties SETTING Carmen and her Father are in the living room of their small, lower-middle class, Alpena, Michigan home. It is snowing. They have just returned from the funeral of Mary Hamilton, wife/mother. On the coffee table is a wine colored goblet, with a … Read more
The series was created by award winning filmmaker and photographer, Matthew Arnold, who says, “I started thinking about La La, after photographing so many of the artists involved. Musician are fascinating subjects, and they add so much to the value of our culture.” This project is the first web-based project for Arnold. His first feature … Read more
The light in Stockholm Sweden where the sun graces the earth for as little as seven hours on the shortest day of the year has a sacred feeling in the early morning. The stippling of the shadows in the snow, echo the cloud formation above as ephemeral moments. The image was cropped to … Read more
Highland-Green Estate was a park of carburetors, illegal vapors, men named Meredith, women with cigars, S&H Green stamps– and mobile habitats that would never experience any true flight in “Free Bird”. Neither the song “Brown Sugar” nor J. T.’s “Sugar Trade” had any place along these dusty strips of road. Chunks of … Read more
Kurt Bloom, like many others, is fighting in the trenches for the cause of Human Rights. He hopes this video project helps those who are like minded spread the message of how important resistance is, in hopes they will carry on the fight. He loves his country and feels a personal responsibility to advocate for … Read more
Characters Antonio- Cheerful, 41 year old single Italian man looking for a long-term relationship.He feels numb when the subject of HIV status arises on his dates.He has been positive for eighteen years, and that fact is beginning to make him feel like an outsider in some social situations.He hates dating for this reason.He … Read more
