I Try to Forgive Your Absence, Facing the Snake in the Kitchen
I mistake it for a night crawler, which recalls my father forcing one into jumpy nine-year-old palms so that I can ruche its long succulence onto a hook. But this one, the color of giblets, spans two checkerboard tiles and looks stunned, as I am: How’d I end up here? A whiplash tongue tastes the air. No Brother Francis, I swallow fear and loathing, seize Tupperware, and then, stifling dry heaves (En garde!) poise bin over reptile—which thrashes into spitfire life, sidewinding into the living room, all snap and writhe. A montage of past insults replays the Why me? refrain: A...
Read MoreNext Breath, Best Breath
For starters, don’t call it a cage corralling the breath. Savvy fingertips mutely Braille two-dozen ribs, each commandeering its own space 24–7, salaaming or shifting, then rising. And re-envision those lungs as maps, the self’s inner atlas: one hundred routes funneling into branch lines, cloverleafs, cul de sacs. Or call them dual panniers flanking a breastbone, one plump koi, kissing a mirror, all lips and flared silk. Wild as papyrus, a Psalter. A Rorschach. A centerfold. Newly un-boned as a cat, inhabit that next inhale, feeling how spacious a backbone can be, freeing shoulders to...
Read MoreRight Brain Blues
These days, she drinks light, shelves those costly oils, her sable brush, the palette’s whorls—azure, cobalt, cyanine—sky piece hues, left to clot. Since the surgery, she cannot bear time vanishing, stroke by stroke. She lives to swim through twilight’s milk, to echo birds on high, larking away, to chew the new-picked April clover stem, four-leafed or not. She will not mourn her lost breasts, nor scenes she’ll never paint—finally here, as is....
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