Schism
I know what you see, when you look at me. A small, unremarkable middle-aged woman. Perhaps you think my lipstick is a little too red for my advanced years? Why doesn’t she, you think, wear something more appropriate? Perhaps you look a second time and are troubled by the arch of my dark eyebrow. Perhaps […]
Blow the House Down
He knows the hole. The gap, the lack, the wound that will not heal, the deafening howl that will not be stilled. He knows the whole for its absence. For its lie. The body’s ache, the cock’s strain. And all the counterfeit promises that can be whispered to it. This is it. This is the […]
From Ice to Tears
This afternoon in early May, with its corpse-grey sky and its implacable heat, the city creaked to a halt. The fan above her low, broad bed, stuttered once, twice, and then unraveled itself with a sigh, like a coiled ribbon unwilling to be constrained by duty any longer. There will be no rain until June, […]
The Withdrawal
Fingers, tongue, words, needles, teeth, cock, nails, fists, lips, blades, ideas, images. It’s not the way he penetrates her that disturbs her; it’s the way he withdraws. Because she knows he yearns to leave with the Polaroid of someone ruined and discarded firmly clutched in his fisted hand. That, she will not allow. When he […]
Spam
That’s not what I meant I sent Notice of a good memory I sent Yesterday’s words I sent Black over blue I sent Rapunzel’s missive I sent Saved up absurdity I sent Not a question I sent Unwisely I sent Poste restante, again I sent Inky cold fingers I sent Elvis Presley I sent Spam
On The Other Hand
Perhaps instead, you come bearing other burdens accrued over a lifetime of seismic events. With a pulse like a warzone, and a tic at the corner of your eye. Torn between a craving for sanctuary and bloodrush of the precipice. A smile that isn’t and a throat dry as doubt. You can leave your sentences […]
All You Ever Wanted
Isn’t this all you ever wanted? A place to spend the saved-up piggy bank of quotidian fantasies? I’ll do you and all your acronyms, baby. The glossy, stunned-faced pornographies of consumption, clutched so long in your sweat-slick hands, chicken-choked in the heat, the two-stroke engine of every banal wank you’ve ever had. All the positions […]
Ruin
Ruin me before time has its ugly way now it grows short and counted. Between lines in my laugh purity has weathered cyclical storms. I would have it wiped away in a blast of bad judgement. Stain me with peaches sticky-fingered love smeared at the corner of your mouth kissed to bursting grimaces in the […]
Knotted
I dream him in knotted clumps, caught in the tangle of puzzled occurrences. Wedged between the pages of books on how to just get through this one next moment. He has taken the one page I need in the phrasebook of a foreign tongue. He comes to me as a man in a hurry, a […]
Sound and Fury
That first three months had been months of silence. Not a lack of noise. The noise was ceaseless. Voices in a language she didn’t know, with its astonishing range of tonality. The dips and rises and cutting off of breath that indicated, not emotion, but meaning itself. Then there were the mechanical sounds. It was […]