Repossessed
A doll’s house on the street of my mind, its tiny curtains drawn, the rooms dark and dusty, the finger-sized furniture tipped over after what appears to have been a drunken rage. And with no sign of its glassine-eyed occupants, the little back door kicked in, or nudged by a mouse, the fourth wall missing in this theatre-of-play, revealing a family’s unspeakable secrets. And in its homey plastic kitchen, a wisp of smoke. A fire coming. A cleansing...
Read MoreImagine That
I’ve imagined all this, one reality as real as any other. I’ve been strolling in the mind’s bestiary, thoughtfulness sawing its green lumber. I’m on a newly discovered planet. I’m a simile or silly allegory. A gargoyle in a cathedral. A fist through a pane of tinted glass. Already I’ve died a thousand nights and have crowned myself king of the gnats. In my mind is a creamer of magical water. I’ve put myself before all others. Why write of the real world, its stems and stoves and fishes? When I can live on the sun instead and carry cities in my bloodstream. I can...
Read MoreSuburban Choka No. 4
I’d wrench free the blade from the mouth of this mower, let the grass cascade in waves that crest into seed, if I might still sail within the shores of my lawn — this propellerless vessel plying back and forth, pressing out ripples with these wheels, in even rows that echo through fall’s...
Read MoreFlight Lines
When the real estate agent hipped open the attic’s plywood door, a swallow fell from the mud nest fastened to the chimney, and — flying from that silt sconce through the mote-thick sunlight — spilled from the farmhouse out a hole where a window should have been. In the workshop below, I noted another nest jammed into the joists’ cross-bridging, and — once we’d moved in — a third was found, wedged into the ceiling of the cellar, its gray, drooping grasses wet with condensation, glaring down in the gloaming like the head of a dank, vigilant witch. The attic...
Read MoreBeauty, Flawed
It’s the thing I’m drawn to, the chipped tooth in pearling light, a hung door crooked in its frame, the snake’s shed skin shimmering by the lake, a spread of feathers in mud, one downy tuft Riffling in the wind, “Here, here, here.” Not that I’m impartial to perfection’s lull, oh, but the lie of it. Nothing speaks of faults like cracked cliffs crazed, the broken glaze of painted pottery, no story in the dead snag, split, gray, leaning into the weathered erosion of decay, the crooked path winding under the weight of stone, always falling, the asymmetric arc of exfoliation, harsh,...
Read MoreHow to Spot a Knock-Off
Twine a wet-paint brush under the wing of a swallow startle it into flocking, spattering the day-dripped sky. Plug a handful of little cut-out letters in the hollow belly of a cicada, let the humming-dark body vibrate tymbals and rename the feel of sap webbing your fingers. Drip salt along the earth and wait for the reed-thin snake to curl through the white, undressing a causeway of slipped sound. Loop a cinnamon-red balloon around a stone, drop it into the acre pond and watch cloud cover pass over the glass-smooth surface, dance in an abandoned warehouse of wind, float over rows of neatened...
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