Beauty
Your fabric obsession leads you to buy the largest girls’ dress left in stock, just to get your hands on that gorgeous mod-Scandi floral print. You have always hidden behind bright patterns and A-line dresses that obscured your protruding gut, unsculpted shoulders, thighs that embrace like lovers. And as hard …
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Slice, Snap, Smash, Crunch, Puncture, Mash, Split, Splinter, Chop, Mangle, Macerate, Mince, Shatter, Pulverize, and Amputate: 15 Ways to Lose a Finger
Just in from the henhouse and garden with fresh eggs and a summer-plump tomato for a breakfast omelet, you use your sharpest knife to slice the tomato thin. You look up at the chickadee at the feeder out the window. Replacing lichened stones that have toppled from the rock wall …
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Teeth: A Brief Personal and Natural History
My parents never smiled with their mouths open for pictures when we were kids. Their teeth were crooked, and a few were missing. My brother and I had crooked teeth, too, riddled with cavities. We learned early to close our mouths for the camera, but sometimes, we forgot. Dad’s dental …
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Dead long
Stiff and cold fingers mourn The keratin rupture For a loot of half-moons On the husband’s charpai frame Crescent marks & lunulae Sit sanguine, the proud Spoils of his night’s labor And an empty glass of Turmeric milk stands on A chinioti night-stand My dowry’s rosewood organ–– The vestal white …
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Argument
One could argue that the chief contributor to the violence in your country is your silence. One could argue that the silence in your mouth means you are eating without chewing. Walking on the street late in the evening, carrying your bag of groceries, your wallet weighing down your loose …
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You cannot sing yourself to sleep
With hands of starlings Or count sheep when legs are dogs Pulling you down the street Sing the child in bed if you can As water rises over the bland Map of this sad Ohio town A reckless river of borrowed Thought, an inkpot of birds Dancing through your inability …
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Associative Sequence A #3
a bird call is a trap. a fox hound is a tool. and if the goose speaks: turn the lights off and get to bed. the elephant in san diego paints all the oceans blue. the preacher on tv lets the widow know that her dead husband wants her to …
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Driving to LA from Temecula to Have Sex with a Minor Actor Who Made a Single Appearance in My Former Best Friend’s Favorite TV Show,
I keep the radio off thinking I might notice things like the names of streets, or the way trees call light into their upstretched arms, instead of worrying about this actor who’s going to feed me scallops and fuck me and never call me again, because I’m nervous, it’s my …
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Since becoming my son’s only friend, I’ve had to become Baba Yaga.
He wants to get boiled alive in my cauldron. To be eaten whole. Don’t spit out my bones, he says. He wants to burrow his mane of curls back into my belly and beat me with sticks and pull out my hair and sleep his face earthward into my face. …
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song of a bird in a box
seagulls tumble—clothes in a dryer— (through the glass a mocking sky) floating apostrophes to signify dominion over flight, fall. he’s euthymic today, cradles an arm. a bird perched in the corner converses with echos. shakes, approaches the nurse with gray feathers under eyes. (hope, fear, pleading) “sleep, my son had …
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