Category: Uncategorized

  •       after Sommer Browning My father wants to know if we’re “pay pals.” My father calls me on his birthday and says, “It’s my birthday.” My father keeps a shoebox of greeting cards in his closet, pre-signed and “ready for anything.” My father tells my fiancé he’ll stop sending me Valentine’s…

  • In memoriam meaning:         Make a wax body.        Cover your body in clay.        Heat.         Make a clay body.        Cover in wax.        More clay.        Heat.         The bronze goes in the empty parts.        The wax drains into a ghost world, formless.         The clay can do two things: become        a kind of printer, making copies, or        crack apart, go into dust.         It…

  • There are many forms of the presenttense. I can say, I am at the baths, on the phonewith my father, and my father knows I am at the baths. Whereas, I can say, in writing:I am at the baths, and the reader might suspectthat the present tense is substituting for…

  • PSALM 6By Sam Bailey     Into the end.    Into a lot of songs.    For the octave.    A Psalm for David: Lord, please don’t arguein Your fury, and don’t, in Your craziness,light me up. Feel sorry for me, Lord. I aminfirm. Cure me, resetme, Lord, my bones have all been confused.And my breath’s been a…

  • Night has many weird angles.I look out at the endless,embarrassing pointiness.Its peaks are paper mouthslicking blue bells in the bulbs.Meaning: light, a daffodil.All suffering is funnelled. Hold a cone up to your heaving life.Turn away your horse.Must I think of every little thing?Remember me like a mirror. — From Issue…

  • It shorts the whitetteIf bricks          of still wet          raw earth          with straw Even summer appears to part from the landscape The expression “my voice follows yours” refers to door to riverEach day flows fromThe humid inversion of history without perspectiveFalling toward something palpable that comes to tip the momentLike a bark of beesColor…

  • Pulled from dark stars. Armoredluck, hot with breath. My first planet is a heartbeat; my secondis dimmer and of the dead. My attachment to the world is a knife floatingabove my forehead and it’s how I make my way. Dramatic taproot! I am my own rider and this knifepoints only…

  • You dug the shit trench, I took two hydroxizines. Zach’s dad traded a case of water for a case of warm beerHe gave me one I took a sip for every Red Cross van that passed us bytheir drivers   waving. We watched as the French Broad swelled   then snappedwe watched our drug…

  • The games I play with myself are questions or maybe answers A puppeteer comes up to only me He says, a little olfactory plot never hurt anybody I say, what say you about architectures of thinking? Every desire has a cousin, tangential and “blue” I know exactly how to tumble,…

  • An elaborate tattoo depictinga home invasion. Shouldn’t memoriesbe enough? A third bicep presentsitself before vanishing into the rest ofthe body. Bricks of condemnation formabove a nipple. Snap your attentionto the ski masks, bedroom, and mantle.The words inscribed below have faded.Now they are impossible to decipher.At one time, it was “cover…