1. On the knees sucking a pestle. [Gripped in particular horrors: the stinked history of other inappropriate drills— being a girl.] Becomes revolving locale, cataclysmic obsession, a time-warp nightmare. In motel rooms: a ditty, a slim filth; asking questions such as when does one become whole, gentle whore? [Unfillable state.] 2. Which language rankles? Unsettling […]
Black Took Collective’s Call for Dissonance
FOUNDED: 1999 LOCATION: CAVE CANEM RETREAT FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN POETS, ESOPUS, NY At Cave Canem each year, a suite of black poets are invited to a castle to write poems. One night in 1999, we who have become Black Took called the other fellows down into the dungeon to begin to create an alternative sphere […]
from DEEPSTEP COME SHINING
Oncet after a heavy rain he come back at daybreak threw down a few dollars and cents alongside a set of pretty glass eyes into a little dish on the dresser flopped crosswise on the bed and slept I started to write I feel lost here and I’m […]
from FOUR PERSONAL ADDRESSES
1. One square meter of prison.
Juicy Salute
I hate it when you drive but I love being a passenger My hands in my lap are curled like two shrimp A maternal feeling, fleetingly A phalanx of pines fleecefully Pines and firs and ferns falling to in the rear view & large-winged birds crossing paths in the sunroof, two cursors enskied My dread […]
When I Kissed July
The room was with me— the subway tile, my railway kitchen, the window plant too. I didn’t look. I tore off June, went directly to it. I’ve been murdered and plowed under, all the above, all the way. To die and to know you died, it’s worse than death to die this way. Someone neutral […]
Crematorium
It has long been common knowledge that unseen bells rejoice. That the mouth was made much bigger than the band it forms. This is the one misunderstanding I hope to clarify: Do I describe myself? Yes, I describe myself. The presentation of an inhuman and static head on a body that is human, and thus […]
from Fugitives
a body is one of the plants in this world a plant is one of the many bodies of the world next question what are tulips something in the desert resists tulips plain and simple a wave by height alone i fingered the foam from a boar’s mouth and tasted foam at her feet in […]
Purple Berries
One day a child showed up in my house. He came up to my chin, not a baby at all. I wondered what I had done to cause this and thought about cavemen who took a mate and did that thing and voilá. How long did it take them to know? Our young ones usually […]
12
I get on the 12 bus and it takes my blinders a good 15 minutes of people watching before my breathing gears down to an unconcerned pace They are all here the misanthropic the bums the tired-dead working overtime to pinch a simple car out of life. The children of welfare guttersnipes standing in the […]
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