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alight that mighty black box that scorched Delphi sorceress it’ll tell us what the fuck...
Read MoreLot’s Confession
Genesis 19:1-29 In the night air the city square was falling fire, our eyes stitched in burning, the last chance to break out. I had to put an end to it, my daughters offered to strangers at the gate yesterday, the girls just squinted at me twisting their braided hair. Up the mountain, my wife crossed her hands, tight fisted against her stomach, wrapping her sadness in the folds of her blue dress when she turned back to head down to the bones of our baby boy in the backyard. Longing for the life she left behind came clawing back to her, stronger than any punishing commandment. She stored...
Read MoreBefore the Contract
The factories encircled us, like gleaming battleships with many wars to feed. I watched my father wear down from work, a sweat-stain heart bleeding through his t-shirt. By day the workers dreamed of sleep, the bed a balm for weary bones. By night the workers dreamed of work, their astral bodies fitting parts to machines. Sometimes, late at night, they walked among the shadows of leaves, seeking the solace of wounded stars. I know now the world will not end, because it turns on the endless labor of those too tired to die. Yet I did not know this in my heart, my bones, before I signed my first...
Read MoreVisiting
I am drifting towards her like vapor. Buddha and Social workers teach us not to assume what goes on within each other’s worlds. Regardless, I see me in her mind, through the haze of disease and hollowed corridors of her memory. Is he real? she wonders. He is my father. He is my husband? My name, as I repeat it, comes to visit, too; the sound folding into the outline of my body, bringing me closer to wherever she might be. For this purpose, I wear the same yellow button-down shirt every time, my hospice badge clipped to the pocket. I never know what will find the switch. She has remembered...
Read MoreWhere I’m From
A blood orange sun told me not to stay. Ears and heart outstretched, I’d bow to its splendor until it dropped from the horizon. Born to be Wild screeched from huge speakers at the church carnival, where we hid behind big trees with former altar boys, tantalizing our younger sisters still afraid of the dark, who dressed in Danskin short sets. Our bachelor neighbor next door neighbor lived with his married sister. A staid accountant at the electric company by day, on Saturday nights he would stumble home, cutting through the neatly trimmed hedges, blood running down his face. But my fear of...
Read MoreMaking Safe to Tell
The only way I know —| I ask him if his faith is beside him. For I am about to tell him news precious to me, her name unspoken for so long. Fragile like the skull of a sparrow, grapes. Mother’s cut glass decanter crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a marked box. Spider web, tissue paper and butterfly wing, a rose in the moment before its petals fall all at once. Like a camel’s back, bridge over water, tibia of horses. Like painting in sand, a thin blue shell, like peace and ego, the underbelly of things. Reminded, he gentles himself to listen, folding his rough-skinned...
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