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
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
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
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
The folding chairs perch on the rocky bank. We’ve wedged the rubbered feet into damp crags, and we hope they stay put. There are three of us here as the tide comes in, and we grip cans of warm PBR tight enough to dent them. We are lonely. We have all been dumped. The youngest … Read more
Snow. Towel for blankets. Slippery leather seats. Lord, give me strength. Dry cornflakes. Up & down & up & down & up … Read more
In the end we die. In the meantime dust collects in corners. I offer the folds of my brain as burrows for snakes and rabbits. I keep Band-Aids in back pockets for when the disasters come. Reminders not everything is fixable. I book hotel rooms and make the unfixable sleep with the already fixed. … 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
She chills to pac p biggie bone Because black pride is a special thing And aping one’s culture Makes her feel less guilty about her Own She is rail thin stocky pleasantly Plump Around the middle sometimes Down home pale with freckles Rarely Hollywood tan Maybe New England alabaster Just enough accents around the breasts … Read more
She was surprised when I told her I’d been to Europe “Why’d you get so excited about going there?” she said I told her I wanted to be somewhere Where I didn’t feel American She claimed she listened to Hip hop But long skirts told me She belonged to god She screwed up … Read more
I lie on my back on my sheets on my bed— the baby a regret, the pains a regret. What was full inside is now outside, on my breast. The baby slick with blood, the blood like a river, the fluid that circulates, carrying food and water and breath and bringing away waste from all … Read more
Juan Angel is jealous that I’m sleeping with a new trickster, but JA and I will be buried together. Others may join us in the only matrimonial bed legally allowed us. Rane Arroyo was a gay, Puerto Rican performance artist, playwright … Read more
could see Cera wrestling through her unstructured paisley fabric purse. She didn’t notice me; my gaze was hidden behind my sunglasses and a US Weekly. I was like a mother looking casually through my daughter’s diary, except I wasn’t her mother; I was her sister. I thought Cera appeared more like an ornamental paper bird … 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
* A girl with Chanel earrings asks me a question about Emerson. * Test: the eraser ends of their pencils dance like little dervishes. * The autistic kid finds God in the right angles of the hall’s lockers. * A martyred French fry: foot-flattened and filthy on the lunchroom floor. * … Read more
they found her small body wired into the heart of the church, small LEDs sprouting through her skin blooming like tiny red flowers too far deep for sunlight to reach. she was sheared clean through to bone by claws big enough to belong to the God hanging over the spot her mangled body lay. … Read more
where are we now? one man asked we shone our flashlights around the cave saw only stone, tall ceilings, dark passages darting off in every direction. The map showed us which random tributary would take us back to sunlight, although it was hard to believe that we were somewhere on that flat piece of paper, … Read more
You did not sleep last night. At least that you can recall. At about one or two in the afternoon, you wake and go to your old Corona to feed it its lunch of ribbon and paper. You think of it as a child—always hungry, always dark, and with a mouth of white teeth. You … Read more
When you were ten you caught a fish and showed your parents that pink flesh. They whooped loud, mercury eyes! Silver guts! That day all guzzled more than enough. and that night, you grasped a new way to sit that made the family round and perfect. All your thoughts from that day on were mother, … Read more
I have sought them at the close of day. In the basement, living room, and the foyer— They’re gone. So is the house, sold to monks who pray For suffering’s cessation and stolid abstinence From attachments. But I loved them, my parents Who let me abide and gave me a chance To ride on their … 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
