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The Weight of a Body on Fire
I. Someone swept eyelashes into piles, pilfered wish- bones from the dustbin. Careful as rain that wept through the sash, bone-damp. Drear of metal, sky like a gun-belt, polish-worn, has the gift: lightening. God’s arrow knows where to strike. II. Before ground breaks; basalt, limestone. The shift of plates is aqueous, earth’s tone tidal, […]
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Scenic Overlook
Bored, the world burns its coal. We behold a sort of Winter.
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Spiritual Errands
Everyday the rosacea sits at the tip of a nosebleed Some call this condition an idealism while too many others diagnose trauma No trivial doctrines stare at a face upended by the holier brow of arched nerves We live by the exhalation of air and now count our slaves as statistics Justice is seldom uttered […]
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Parts from the Notebook for the Occasion
The first thing is the instruments the measurements the mapping. For supplies try a market. For inspiration let the faucet run. Any water will do. Trains in emergencies. The mouth unnecessary. Forrest has been to the beach. If all you need to do is go home to watch a French film then go, for god’s […]
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Serial
Pain akin to a waveless lake — palpable and blue — this headache’s the episode in which I return to myself unused.
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What Is a Community?
The first time I realized I was a member of a community of writers occurred in the mid-1980s when I read a letter to the editor in the Detroit Metro Times, at that time an alternative weekly (but now, a franchise).(1) The letter-writer complained bitterly about an alleged coterie of writers dominating Kofi Natambu’s journal […]
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light
1. over and over through the throttled light my deeply scored hands hold you to my flame my fingers at your throat I moor you to the brazen night your candle twisting around my eyes 2. define me for the dirt around my throat you who carry bread from your table to […]
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I would quiet old men
Learning, surely, doing nothing but aging, as though locked somewhere in song.
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Still Another
(wherein metaphysics upbraids theory in the service of ethics) Breaching Self to accommodate another, theory intruded: Brother became Other while Sister was still Soul — but still another. Residing in the inner sanctum — the Self’s shelf — an embryonic idea was coerced by its too-easy resemblance to Mother — but still another. The hindrance […]