Other Tongues
my words are unravelled by wind shaken into sentences by a bluster of firs and I find myself hyphenated in a landscape never seen before here commas are more than rivers colons rise in fountained geysers while I paragraph between sand-dunes run from one period to the next semi- the next semi- who or what? rain sprays the land with brackets until I am italicized past retrieval and must return to the first word I spilled into the...
Read MoreReading ‘Elephant’
A sight-reading child, I thrilled to the image sheathed in a word— elephant— the elongated contour, the tall l, h, and t, transporting me to an African savannah, to baobab trees and a striped big top, a sequined gymnast in arabesque on a blanketed, thick-skinned back. Circus of the preposterous—who created your enormous folds? That thousand- muscled trunk, your euphonium...
Read MorePit and Pit
after Brenda Hillman From different roots, the same word evolves with opposite meanings. As in one that’s both the hollow and the filling seed. Evolves, as in takes many lives. Much flesh turned on the spit above that ditch. Many too tough nuts spit coolly out. Across the room, a young man with gelled hair cranes over a scoured plate to smile more exclusively at the ingenue who has eaten nothing. Their first date. She has diddled the bok choy and two flies are parading on her arctic char. He may never be more eager, she never more enthralled. You know how it...
Read MorePuritan Spelling
We hereby give up The. We relinquish long & lovely spellings, like the luscious inkiness of glamour. We offer up italic, using, as it does, more energy than soap… We end ellipses. We sacrifice extrvgnt vowls which have trvld hlfwy round th wrld, 4 us 2 cn consme thm out f seasn. 2 say nothing of the heartless ongoing waste of Silent E. Dubl letters, too. we renounce the upprcase as false idols. punctuation alowd only in deep winter if w/...
Read MoreSeeing in French
Maybe in Greek you can say time is something real like tides and sand, trees dividing light. Maybe in Sioux snows will do and months can be when raccoons wake from a thaw and when geese lay eggs in the reeds. But after picking cherries and a summer rain I imagine the moment in an alphabet of no fixed line. I see the sweet meat bloom from blackness to eternity with nothing in between. Maybe in the tongue which gave us our mind we can measure frequencies like fruit and water. But in my wet shirt and heavy from eating, in the dreaming that comes from being full, I keep trying to get...
Read MoreA Taste for Speed
Hitching: 1968 Easing their spines on post-marked ends of property, the road-worn sag, sink, recall or forget some other lives in meaner contexts, a bag or bedroll dropped, just far enough a...
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