Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
Elegy for Q I. I stood above the kitten, freshly struck, fur a fluid silver like the side of a shark. Her blood was spilled nail polish on new carpet, skull only slightly cracked, blue eyes open against the road. I glanced to the windows of the nearby houses, imagined twitches amongst the draperies, lamenting that here, people are around when you touch dead animals….
The nurse left work at five o’clock, or later. For night shifts, she left at five a.m., the sun cusped in the mountains on the edge of town. The work never left the nurse, the nurse’s husband always said when he was alive. When she held his hand, she had felt for a pulse. The nurse’s husband used to leave for work at six-thirty. He…
Mass Extinction we cannot know what evolutionary biologists will call this age we cannot know which of our offspring will survive at night we count them and wonder which one will it be we search their sleeping faces for resistance we are looking for a future we will build with what we have left we understand that geological memory drives vertebrates we…
which is to say we have never seen trees die. We have seen them break from the root hurl their limbs against windows snaptwist like brittle bone. We have seen hurricanes transparent oceans and a sun that is a sun that burns freckles onto your skin. We have seen months without rain and months without electricity. We have known the mythology of seasons and the…
if I should say there is a wolf at the table with half my DNA and people keep inviting it back if I could do more than survive in this territory where they pass bone china plates, not knowing how I breathe, hoping the mottled gray beast won’t sense this weakness and if I follow the leader / fall limp / fake death would it…