Wild forsythia lean their yellow tongues over the cutbank where storms gouged out the land. Trout that lasted winter hold below the boughs like wind chimes singing in the current. What counts is touch, skin on skin, not the knife sliding down the white belly, revealing white meat and blood. I’m happy enough to know … Read more
The gun slides back in the drawer the phone rang and I thought my daughter was still alive, stranded on the side of the road with a busted timing belt except there was no sound on the other end of the line. The gun slides back in the drawer and the edges of frosty windows … Read more
“I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.” -Maggie Nelson, Bluets Dear Loneliness, I feel like a crow-black-wingéd thing. Today marks one year. I tally the days like evidence. I do not know why, or what spherical time patterns do to … Read more
Riding the bus after another day on the same job, caged in the same cubicle where neglected books and paper piles gather dust years deep, I do not feel better knowing it could be worse. Getting off at the bus stop, I ache for my friend stricken by Lou Gehrig’s disease and the coming day … Read more
I don’t want to talk about how rare you are – how you’re far too grand, far too human. I want to talk about the tempest you’ve conjured between my thighs that stings as much as any abrasion on the skin when you’re absent. How you whittle me away into a convex shape with one … Read more
It wasn’t like any gimmick could stop me. I was the fifth train car, that field down the road. You said you knew what to trace – that synapses were defunct. And it’s not like that war could have stopped you. Tonight you’ll play the victor in some other fuck-up, while I watch, as always, … Read more
Above ground between the wheel ruts one dead mole, dark as the earth it turns to, fur soft as ash, against the gray basalt – others claw below ground. Römhild Work Education Camp, 1944Irena Praitis is the author of six books, most recently One Woman’s Life (Diversion Press, 2010), Straws and Shadows (Moon Tide Press, … Read more
The mountain will bask, sun-warmed and green, in the summer we won’t see. The local innkeeper once advertised a fairy grotto in the sand cave where we store shovels to bury our dead. Beyond the barbed wire, gold leaves spin through shafts of sunlight. Leaves, not snow. How we will ache when it comes, from … Read more
They shave your head, line you up under their perforated-pipe shower, peck at you on your crawl toward roll call. They scratch your number in their ledger, stack your clogs, striped trousers, a rag- patched shirt, one round cap. Laundered in another era, threadbare, who’d wear these clothes—prisoners? Criminals? Men like you? We all need … Read more
Wish you were here I mean, not dead me bored on our weekly phone chats, you babbled about the latest bistro, café, winebar on Montague street in Brooklyn and did I remember the Arabic grocery store on Atlantic Avenue? I did. We bought cans of tahini and packets of pine nuts and went home and … Read more
After their first child killed herself, the cranes studied all the right books, heads trembling each night as though struggling against some ash-covered morsel working its way down the throat. They treated their remaining daughter the best they could, following the advice of experts: staying tough, no treats unearned, hoping for some sky-road past the … Read more
at the Temple Sagrada Família in Barcelona His thoughts on a nascent spire, Antonio Gaudí steps in front of a speeding tram. He left no blueprints of the temple, only models made of birdshot and clay, whorls to mimic nature’s forms. Eight decades later, staircases corkscrew nowhere as carpenters rev saws and guess the curves … Read more
Decide now, before the next breath, that there is nothing to lose – do it again with the next, and again for summers in winter, till breathing is exposure and expression is breathing Till every pocket is emptied and inside is out and outside is not and mandalas bloom Till the last exhale of the … Read more
Though the hall is packed, no one will sit near her in this noisy temple of tables and folding chairs. Surrounded by their clovers and animal feet, their river of cards, they are wary of prophesy. Seduced now by games of chance, Cassandra mutters her madness of letters and numbers, a whispered voice one step … Read more
Sipping the drink named after her, she tells me how each bartender makes it slightly different. All night I listened to her complaints: Not enough Southern Comfort. Inferior brand of cranberry juice. Too much lime. The years have found their tomorrow in her. Her 17″ waist gone to Doritos and Little Debbies, pale skin lost … Read more
He said he prepared the space shuttle. Because of him, men walked on the moon. If we were young, we could have worn parachutes or held on to pillows, floating through air, or I’d fly an airplane straight to the Amazon, spanning across countries. I was leaving Regal Heights Nursing Home, waving goodbye to my … Read more
Sometimes at night, we lie awake, windows wide open, shoes by our beds, dreaming about the day before when we could return love so easily. We whisper, “I’m sorry,” our words fall like dust to the floor and rise to the roof into the air we breathe. (My mother said it was from the streets; … Read more
An undertaker in his twenties moved to town with his wife and their brand new baby and silver dog. They made their family home in the upstairs of the funeral chapel where no one had lived in years. They drove the hearse everywhere with that dog’s shimmering head stuck out the front passenger side window. … Read more
Rust-stained but clear in the morning light, the brook fell into the lake, a string of deer bones paying from its mouth; jaw bones algaed, vertebrae sowed among the cobbles, they lay beyond the shadows of our fishing poles and false hellebore that lined the bank. We named the stream “Deer’s Peace” in our awkward … Read more
You told me you were dying only slowly, one cell at a time so we couldn’t see it. You told me four years ago that only slowly, one cell at a time you’ll smear into dust on my palms. You told me four years ago and I almost forgot you’ll smear into dust on my … Read more
She tells me: if you open it, you finish it. The first time wine touched my tongue I was too young to know, in communion you shouldn’t smack your lips and say ahhh when the priest tips the chalice back. Now, 18, I felt the bitter warmth that tasted like Sunday. So similar in memory, … Read more
There is something spectral about sitting cross-legged on the carpet staring into the center of a flame. Washed with darkness of a blown transformer, candlelight licks at unblinking routers, cable boxes. In thick silence, I whisper to St. Cyprian as my fingers slip through heat the way my mother showed me at the dinner table. … Read more
In our long, accelerating years, adolescence a dot in the rearview mirror, we could not anticipate this return—clandestine bed in a parent’s house, the startled gasp of senses wakened, the breathless stifle of a not-so-secret tryst that even nearing voices cannot uncouple. We are pulled back to youth, this incarnation made sweeter by the swallowing … Read more
In your mouth, I am trying to find it. I want to suck it from you, take it into my mouth and swallow, I want to hold it inside me in the long weeks we are apart. I want to suck it out, hold it in, warm core around which I can huddle, catch the … Read more
To go along dying and singing ~Cesar Vallejo To go along living and breathing into a world that is dying, cloves knocking into lungs, the bloody raincoat of love, that poor shrub of a spouse spilling always, a multitude of whiny details. Misery, complaints, traffic, the cost of things, etcetera etcetera. Forty years, you’d think … Read more
