To go back to last week
____and tell my subway self it is ok to make
________eye contact: the eyes of the terrified
beseech. If only I had smiled at her,
____introduced myself (never mind the stutter),
________made that self-deprecating joke
I’ve been saving, then maybe she
____would’ve laughed and caused eyes
________to flit up and dart around, and the
musician next to her could’ve
____added his two cents, and she might’ve
________pointed to his saxophone, and perhaps
he would’ve begun to play, and surely the
____other passengers would’ve stared and chuckled
________and clapped until the hurtling hearse filled with
________music and movement and touch and dance—
I am on the ‘L’ now, departing for downtown, and
____cannot hear the violinist playing against the station walls,
________unnoticed, to the left of the descending stairs.… ...continue reading
i told my son you can reach me i am not the weather the same way my father was the weather i am not mystery or storm or the perfect day apology for the storm you can reach me i am willing to be shaken i used to be shaken all of the time you you you son you can reach me i have built a table too small to eat at so that we can sit there and hold no pursuit other than me what do you need
– Darren Demaree… ...continue reading
“Well, if it doesn’t jell, it isn’t aspic, and this isn’t jellin’!”
—Psycho
Brine shrimp spawn a galaxy in a fishbowl.
Ergo, sea monkeys exist.
So do Higgs bosons and demodex.
These last look like scorpions
and live on the canopy of your eyelashes.
The difference being they’re not sold
at toy stores as a novelty item.
PETA has so far remained notoriously
mum about sea monkeys.
Long before that Nazi sympathizing
corpolite von Braunhut patented his presto shrimp
aquariums in the late ’60’s,
Kubla Khan’s gift to Marco Polo when they first met
was a porcelain bowl of sea monkeys
swimming in unfettered motility.
Michaelangelo sculpted a frieze
of sea monkeys once.
It’s now in one of the nine circles
of the Vatican, next to Pope Joan’s feeldoe.… ...continue reading
I levitate to the thirteenth floor
each time I proclaim how desperately
I covet connection,
and once the capsule jerks to a halt,
and my stomach drops,
the light blooms,
the imperceptible chime rings,
but the door won’t budge
because sincerity is too much,
and the floor was never there.
– Brontë Pearson
Author’s Note: “Triskaidekaphobia” was written for a poetry exercise called The Fish Tank of Rage, where you are given an abstract emotion and a random object and must craft a poem combining the two. “Triskaidekaphobia” was the product of “the elevator of rejection” and plays upon the idea of many buildings lacking a 13th-floor due to superstition. … ...continue reading
Evans, whose object would have been
to draw the biographer’s attention away
from the business of being photographed,
might have asked Edel to interpret
Eliot’s encomium on James:
that he had “a mind so fine
no idea could penetrate it.”
Edel, distinctly self-conscious,
might have laughed this off
as modernist hagiography,
allowed as how James
had plenty of big ideas:
Innocence, Europe, Art.… ...continue reading
“My biggest fear…” I could tell him my biggest fear, but he wouldn’t understand it. Only two people in my life have understood it and one of them would never admit to understanding it. We are the 1%. The cosmic joke. The empty. The unexplainable.
We are living contradictions because we are not one person. No, we don’t have split personalities. We are always us. Always complicated, and always multiple things, never just one thing.
We want so badly to be a part of all this, but we will never be a part of this because we cannot commit to being one person. We will not take one path because we do not see the point in walking when the destination is not our decision. The destination is the same no matter the path.… ...continue reading
Because I’ve felt up the smooth spine of books
with the caress of my finger, and I’ve passed time
under the hold of a good book, I know my mother.
When I was seven, I learned about stone soup
from hungry soldiers in an audiobook, and you
wouldn’t believe how the stomach thinks in hunger.
My mother grew up and lived against a menu of hunger
and her Bible was the mountain peak to a pile of books.
She’s stopped going to church, but she’s said to me, you
have to believe. I was fifteen the first time
a pastor’s preaching made my tears collect like soup
in a falling bowl. I have seen my mother… ...continue reading