September 2010
5 posts
Fragment for Michael Burkard
Philip, Stephen, Larry: these are the names of my fathers. Where is Michael? He is off in the woods with himself not being my father. Michael is a ghost, Michael is unseen, and Michael drags a fiery sword that unmakes the world. Michael is un-is. Michael, when I lost the words I hated you. It’s in the poems, the ones not found, not written: the unpoems in the unbook, the names that tell...
Honor Your Father and Mother
It all seems easy to an innocent mind: there’s a method to the rules, with children wedged between adults and dogs in God’s arrangement of the cosmos, and so as a kid you take orders from the top down. But there’s no provision for what to do when your parents start acting like fools, for when your grandmother kidnaps you, when your mother brandishes a knife at your sleeping...
Rock, Paper, Scissors #2
We each start out as paper, I suspect— just a name mused across some blank scrap to tease out the way your identity will come to sound and soon suit you, and before you know it you’re being torn from the woman who dreamed up your name, who slept like a rock the night you first fused into her, though she couldn’t have known at the time what was settling inside her like a...
Rock, Paper, Scissors
There really isn’t one that wins them all. Each time you go to choose it could fall either way, and even though it was just a silly game to pass the long bus ride on the way to the loathsome school, maybe the real lesson was in those shaking fists that met in the aisle on the slow yellow barge. Maybe the teachers knew that algebra wouldn’t save us one wit when our ass was in...
How Low Can You Go?
Everyone thinks loss is the worst, but worse yet is what isn’t known. Those loves that ended in bitter words, smashed glasses—we may wonder, What if… but in our hearts we harbor the truth: no good was ever to come of that. But the calls that trailed off, the unanswered letters and drunken, late-night texts: where did that other person slip off to, what bright corner of the world...