Making a Life
Sometimes, the break occurs—Lee Krasner You wake up to a grey world. Sky. Street. Morning as a weight, heavy with both light and its absence. Does it matter what colors make up your regrets? Blue. White. Every decision is a betrayal of something. You once dreamed you would write …
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Train Passing by Hospital in Hackensack, NJ
for Sarah Ten weeks for a breast scan, now twelve. The mind is prose and will wander. Here on the range, with an IV cannula hanging from the crook of my arm, the floor changes across the hours, a Rolodex of sunlights. Nothing is like it was: people full of …
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Gibbon’s Decline and Fall
Logan, Terminal C I could do without my sons, she says, the woman rinsing her hands beside me. Natural and artificial flavors, her voice, like flat orange soda— Wait. How is it she doesn’t fear the reach of tragedy’s terrible, plausible legions? Baffled, …
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Aubade
How does blue carpet at once muffle and trumpet clock radio down the hallway to which our bedrooms are rigged, as boats to a dock? A scotched timbre sweet with peat, the generational reveille of Carl Kasell at work: Soviets admit nuclear accident. Caterpillar in a spool bed harvesting …
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Winter Visitors
by pines linger Cato Zilpha voice afire these woods remember her house bones, bricks amid oak copse Brister my epitaph a discolored fortune Fenda Black children rose before roots wild at the edge of myth // let well tempered men salute poetry without spark witness in …
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Study in the Death Ambition with Apple Tree
In love, as in war, I learned _ to skin sweet from meat—you next to me at some farm upstate, where we go _ to pretend we are something together that borders on the country of sweetness—I learned to eat _ …
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look it’s a mango
frida got mad at a dove today, had to dig a hole about it in the shade of a gambel oak my mom believes is an elm. i don’t know how to convince her i know anything at all, i show her acorns. she tells me how at nine …
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Caleb
It wasn’t until I saw Mama’s arm broken stupid, clean bone catching the light, the blood pink on the broken skin that I began to believe in God, or rather in his capacity to break shit. Maybe all He knows is how to break women like my father knows …
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Wherefore
Buttons were a problem. My back hurt. I said to the surgeon, take these breasts away from me. I wanted to leave something of my twenties in the biowaste bin. I wanted to welcome my reflection, which is to say I was not yet clear of naïveté. I caught …
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Days Before the Birth of Drumming
The son I fathered two lifetimes ago rarely visits anymore Not in the form of dancing blue spheres Nor as a curve billed thresher going on and on about the war with far too few ceasefires and all the lambs we slaughtered together because death isn’t a guest but …
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