It is black. Black and rearing up; rounded points, pointy points. Black and matted together; plates and plains, lines and radiant circles. Black on black. Black on black on black.
____
Is this a mountain? Mountains? Is this the ocean—all …
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Part One. Before Getting to My Desk
Before getting to my desk this morning I’ve woken to the back of Luke’s spine in blue light and understood for the first time that is the image I have been dreaming of …
Read MoreIn my beginning is my end.
—T. S. Eliot, “East Coker”
I always find them alone. Laid on their backs and clawing at the ceiling, like they were still falling from a too-high place. I find them on the …
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I think everyone’s glad I’m dead, said the stripper
with the caved-in face. Her fingers were bone with no
sinew. She flapped her arms at the two wrens
caught up in the rafters and staring down
on the
Available in our Spring/Summer 1990 issue.
I
Notebooks stood in a rack, straight and tightly shut beside a ruckus of birthday cards. Their colors drew my eye as I went past. I am overly susceptible to colors, even though so much of the world seems …
Read MoreOn or about 12 April 1888, a gaunt Scottish man, recovering from a “sharp attack” of tuberculosis at Saranac Lake, in rural New York state, wrote to his favorite American author, then resident in Connecticut. “I shall be from Thursday …
Read MoreA bird’s pancreas looks very much like ours does, slim along the intestine. Nearly every creature with a backbone has a pancreas, lungfish and lamprey eels and ray-finned fishes being notable exceptions. In mammals, the organ is always small, shown …
Read MoreI am perfectly fine here: ice-choked,
thin as an eyelash. The bootprints on
my headboard are getting darker.
The chimney: clogged with fish eyes
and sea glass. Somewhere my enemies
are singing to the food on their plates.
As a
