you’re a demigod, honey boy: a refrain of affirmation though dulcet still you’re just human learn not to rely on sight because it’s only clear too late, looking back follow the scent…
He stands still and the creek does not— a waist-deep shortcut to nowhere. An arm, bare to the elbow, nudges the morning fog. A thread of water- shine tongues the air. The impossible reach, his expectant watch. O to hold in your careful grip this perilous truth and finesse its…
That old man proclaims, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” But where in the body does the race bone lie? Can we find it on an X-ray? Is it locked inside the spine? Does it make its home among the vertebral bones? Or is it hidden in…
There is no god for the gay unfortunates The abomination stuffed in the black dress, chosen because the frills hug everything a father could not or chose not to Fathers burdened with being the talk of the holiday party Blessed with the son carrying a lisp To be the hollow…
to the man who told me he was tired of hearing about Strange Fruit watch them hang // blood oranges // ripened from the inside out // swollen from the intake of rain // juicy // best picked when dead // sliced from the tree // cut open //watch…
She drove down on a glorious May morning, and had she not already known she was leaving God’s country she would have suspected she was entering it. Kathryn Banks had woke in an angle of light, the early sun falling through the bedroom window of her Loudon County estate and, for…
You remember in Rome you stood in front of a facsimile of a remarkably narrow sleigh bed, a suggestion of the actual bed in which Keats died from consumption when he was twenty-five. What caught your attention were the ceiling carvings over the bed, and you studied them a long…
2016 was the year of trauma. Prince died. Muhammad Ali died. Harper Lee died. The Pulse nightclub shooting occurred. Philando Castile was murdered by the police in front of his girlfriend and her four year old daughter. Donald Trump was elected president. Trauma. One trauma after another. My life has…