I can’t write today. Your pain is my pain. My neck feels soft. You wash the dishes—you get hard easily. Leaves everywhere. Andrea moves through the house. I let her. The Salvadorian Revolution was extreme, a laboratory of the Cold War. I bite my lips. I wash the dishes. Impatient you—you sleep in the back … Read more
The young couple is discordant—two blue shirts making out among the shuffle of art-grazers (an ocean of eyes). At the exhibit’s entrance, a dome of aluminum cups and plates throws circles of light on the floor. A stone Buddha sits in meditation against the south wall. His ears (stretched to his hips) forgive … Read more
Before the meningitis, after the endless year in Colorado, and the aftertimes before the children waiting, the myriad memories that rush in and push out the memories I keep remembering, I’d rather not remember and I remember I remember remember —all but the names, just faces and just feelings just impressions really are all I … Read more
It’s 14º, dry at the Jackson St. station, and I’m waiting for the Blue Line to Bucktown. Some late-40s bro strokes his acoustic, his graveled falsetto slides through his “Man in the Mirror” encore. Cruising the silent tracks of the L, I can guess where their lingering caress might take me. I’m studying a pint … Read more
At night, if you’re quiet, you can hear the campfires gossiping. They laugh like javelinas at our episodic sleep. Whooping cranes and blue herons, in February, litter Sundown Bay. Save the wintering waders, the coastline is anemic. It’s like living in a place where there are too many dogs— this jammed choir of Camaros on … Read more
I am coming to you now. When Dorothy was alive, I did not think of you as much more than the scenery framing our friendship. She noticed when you were low or high or altered. Do you save anything? Do you keep some of the world in your watery heart? … Read more
Here is a small prairie on 5th Avenue. Grass and wildflowers hold off concrete and buses with their dried clothes. I do not know the name of this feeling: Is it longing or ecstasy? I want to say to Dorothy, Here’s something we missed. She once said I am going to miss me. A … Read more
After Mark Rothko (see images here) We are driving on a white road. We know it cannot go on forever and yet that is what it is doing, brightening and widening, widening till there is no more road, just land and sky, sky and lightly penciled stars, hills and bones and Dairy Queens. We must … Read more
Patrick accidentally injected over an ounce of engine grease into the middle finger of his right hand They should have amputated it, said his wife It cost us $16,000 to fix and it’s still not right I sat on the couch stroking a mangy cat I didn’t notice it was mangy but after we left … Read more
Make sure to rope yourself to such posts as the smells of jasmine and rain in the evening, or the sound of blackbirds plucking worms before the dark swells over. Ease into the rush. Lift one limb at a time. Practice opening one eye, then two – one nostril, then both. Wiggle your toes, loose … Read more
After Mark Rothko (see images here) The present we know, with its ascending stairs that are somewhere else descending, happened as we wandered, as the field widened and took us in. We saw what we were as we held it close and it doubled and gave. As the Plumeria opened, we savored, sometimes painfully, as … Read more
Retelling the story, I’m too embarrassed to name the bunny hill where I lay splayed like a rag doll, a trail of gear marking the tumble of my undoing. Endless equations of people dangled on the lift above, suspended and swaying, their skis forming X’s V’s and 11’s over my face. My third day on … Read more
Bring the moon closer, darling, I like to press my face to you, your sky, and on my toes, stretched to the limits of the veins in my neck, I feel nothing but the cooling air picking apart my hair, searching for something sweet. There was a great temptation to lick the dark … Read more
I ran a very long way for a very long time & as I slowed to arbitrarily finish, I was handed a medal for the goal of which I knew was sacrifice, but what was being called achievement. I ran a very long way for a very long time & I as I did … Read more
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. 아름아, mom calls. I’m talking to my partner on my mother’s couch, telling her the same things I’ve been saying all my life: Korean doesn’t have a ‘r’ sound, so it’s more like a ‘r d l’ all smushed together, not a roll like in Spanish. I see this woman I love … Read more
To begin with The hieroglyphical origin of My identity was simply no body But a common reed Bowing its head to the rising sun On the barren bank of the Nile Slim, tall, hollow-hearted Standing against tropical heat Until one day “I” was used As a human symbol, an open vowel Referring to the … Read more
Riding the RER Watching the graffiti scream From ghetto buildings As I enter Paris A deaf mute running A hustle Gets no sympathy from The passengers Watching blacks speak French And wondering can color link Us into kinship? Eating a baguette at gare de lyon As beggars wear their hunger On their faces Smoking gauloises … Read more
Wine or water waits. The leaf floats like a flower in wind. Sunlight becomes red with envy. The stone threatens. Air coagulates into sound. It’s as though everything living stops. There is no answer good enough. The mind is not like water or wine. Leaves are not flowers. No matter how yellow the sound, … Read more
The difference is slight. There are scratches at the door. Some animal scurries off as you turn, and it’s gone to hide just out of view, but you know it’s there waiting. Turn around too often and you get lost in the browns, the fine line between worlds becomes sharp as glass, loud as … Read more
Hide in plain sight: dye your hair blonde, claim to be a “Black Irish,” product of the mating between a Spanish Armada survivor and a lassie. Drink California wine without shuddering, without tasting your people’s blood. Go on wine tours to network with alcoholics who turn pork barrel politics into silk … Read more
