Story

The girl aligns all the objects in a room. She takes photos. Heralded in the corner, she pushes record and answers unheard questions into a pink and green box. The girl changes colors. She sleeps in bathing suits and thinks up instances where someone she does not know stops her. There is driving. There is no time to look at what’s leaving. There is no time to read about it in a book or underline its shapes. The pink trim speaks to the windows. It swallows up the corners but lets small buckets fill up below. She sleeps on damp blankets and doesn’t move. She dips her hand over the edge and reaches for familiar shapes, unsure if she is lying next to someone she knows. In the grey house there are two beds. One of them is close to the floor, where once she found four hands. In the house on the street with no name the bed folds open and withstands little pressure. Her body as light as it could. She has thinks about water and then packing and then about giving it all away.

Everything's hanging ever so gently

Automobiles
& search lights

& intimacy sulk
down the Mississippi,

redeeming narrative
structure & direction.

If this is “I” here,
then this is not “I”

there and if we skim
along for long enough

we will outlast
what rivals our

warmly brushed faces.
Patterns menace liplessly

in the grown light,
in rolling side steps

& the indelible warmth
of all or nothing.

A lark, is a lark,
is a lark, lonely

on a empty top
& wants things

that are still
without names

on this flowing penitentiary,
wants to recollect

one isolated image:
a kitchen with high

chairs, a counter
that one can climb.

The Dream Counsel

Folding chairs and folded paper

taciturn born anticipation

slinging thread crossed and knotted

covering no one, when no one is near

the open glade slides along a metallic edge

a man makes a lake to cool off the land

the ghost show stars 10 little fingers in a plastic case

pink and orange hollyhocks toned by geography in the back yard

the alignment of beetle shells on bark

toad-padded sidelines, their chins pulled tight

acquired by burnishing perimeters

red and swollen and careening

the roaring civilian incident

action waits to be retrieved from those who know better

The Smell Hound

Chirping from behind the refrigerator

door, degrees varied in warm bodies

& pitching luck caught in garbage cans.

Concession made for larger skeleton hands.

There is either feeling good or feeling bad

or running with explosives duct taped

to your legs, circling around brick buildings

& glazed over by practicality.