How to Write a Sonnet
First: seize the world as your subject matter. Understand that its grids, its grit, its effluvial patterns can be shaped into fourteen unwavering lines. Next, imagine that you’re M. Buonarrati, acquiring a chunk of granite so pearlsheened, translucent, you glimpse beneath its stippled ice a magnificent something struggling to draw its first painwracked breaths. Then, tap with your icepick, scratch with your pencil the imperfect surface, crack and dig, scribble and mutilate until the ephemeral entity you claim as your progeny pushes out drenched and wet, slippery and hot-bloodied, ...
Read MoreMy Best Friend’s Mental Illness
sprouts, suddenly, piranha teeth. The morning’s made for sleeping. She angles her head onto mountainous white pillows; they cradle her neck, the gritty seams splicing it; her dirty black hair, fanning across fabric, creates phosophorescent rainbows of filth I long to stroke. I’m always with her on those bleached, dead mornings when she sleeps: I hover, then, over the bed, a quick sliver of light that flickers, shivers, glows, Arctic-ephemeral, shedding a warmth that steals under her chin, steadies her trembling throat. “Breathe, Sweetie,” I whisper; her eyes open and...
Read More