Erosion
Winter is the worst. The skin of my hands fissures, reddens, widens, tiny islands disrupt and thicken there, scar tissue, angered by the scratch of bacteria under fingernails. Typically, physical erosion proceeds fastest on steeply sloping surfaces like the curve on the back of my thumb, the slope between pinky and ring finger. Human activities…
Hierapolis
How do you begin to explain the bird corpsesjust inside the open yawn of the cave? Old versions of us couldn’t do it, huddled and hushed each day a new fallen bundle of feathers collapsed as if there really was a veil between here and the place no one gets a return visit from. I…
Afterthought
It’s the space that happensbetween a greetingand a follow-up questionto a conversation you’ve barely heard, a distance from hereto the kitchen table, a ghost, drawn in by the smellof cooking eggs and toast the burning smellfamiliar and also lonely. It’s the voices upstairs,just outside the door. As a scientist, how could youhave experimented on yourselfwithout…
An Unkindness
Again, the apocalypse,or at least its cloudsarrived early, as they do,in August. The winds rush to gatherand gossip with smoke signals,coating the pinetops like a dirty secret. Nothing useful, like who fuckedup the campfire or whose corpseis being smothered by 20-foot flames. Probably more elegant, likewhich patch of moss is making her debut,which bird decided…
Lemons
In the cracked, dry earth of Southern California I sprouted roots and branches, a living, vertical palindrome that bears yellow fruit. Only this fruit is more bitter, no sour pucker but a hiss and tightening of the jaw. My arms are laden. Come. Pluck one and sweeten its flesh with honey. You can taste the…
When I’m Dead
burn me and plant a tree over my ashes, carbon fuel, the old carcass of an older body maybe. How many roots will my fingers be? Might I finally be tall? The minutes slow again as days were when I ran through the garden and pulled fruit from drooped branches to eat with my cousins.…
Ants
It doesn’t matter how farI move the cat food from it’s sacred spot, the lines of movement keep on. Tiny black patterns, smells, trails to honey, sinkwater, sweet liquors. Why can’t we strike a bargain? I would give a pint of blood a week to the bitchy mosquitoes in the park if I could just…
The winter of
It is winter, and we must be brave. Outside the car windows freeze over as various piles of blankets roam the city, some silent, some screaming. Across the street, the White Bird takes them and gives them what is possible. They line up for hours before the gates open, waiting for treatment that is a…
New Year
This last year has given birth to me, into the new year, not in a weird way. I have been squeezed. I have cried at pure chaotic grief as I left the safety of last year into the lonely quality of the next. People are supposed to shed the dust and baggage they collected from…
Like Us
Someone dropped a pair of sunglasses into an orangutan enclosure. She cautiously climbed sideways to look at it, back to the audience, picked them up, inspected them, and peered through the dark lenses at a dark enclosure. She took them off again, just to make sure her world was really bright, put them back on,…
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Melcontents 