prose poem: results 1–24 of 87

It is evening and the dark climbs through the window, sits down beside us on the couch, demands the remote control. We curl our legs together, socks to socks, my hand pressed on your lower belly. "What if you suddenly stopped breathing," I say, imagining your death, the funeral, the useless black shoes. I smile, bury my nose in your dirty dark hair.

Below the ice, frozen air, hibernating frogs. My cheeks alive with the burn, my ears. I wanted to touch air, awaken the frogs from their sleep. A bitter cracking sound. From the bottom of the pond, I called to you.

By the time I finished writing, you had disappeared inside me. An absence bounded by the imagined shape of your skin. The body only token of the thought that creates it, yet I counted years by those touches, those bruised moments of light. Plankton sparking in the suffocating cold. I opened the ocean's windows against the lateness of night up there…

Descendant of Puritans, packing tape vouchsafes little intelligence of its overseas journeys. In the desk drawer it's mum,

set to do the job. As my father asks no questions of his breakfast: "It fills the stomach."

Prepare to bind mightily the flaps of your box. (Inside, some fragile thing afloat in shredded paper.)

Pull one off the track and you'll see: getting it back into the fridge is like pushing a wheelchair uphill in a stiff wind. We had eleven refrigerators in eleven houses in eleven cities. Now we have only their crispers, shaming us with bits of our old rind.

After she left, I found the Collins glass of table wine on the windowsill. It counterweighed the nightbird's absence. After she left the second time, I lit a candle in our churchyard…

it is 7:30 am  on the 4 train to the bronx  we are heading fast uptown  doors swinging rough out from their sockets  rush of burnside fordham road kingsbridge terrace  old armory  dirt and trash mark the concrete below me  rip of train  i sit next to a woman with the number nine on her chest  sprawling her breasts stretched  her baby sleeps below  sound

Growing wild and rank, out in the grass. They asked me to bend down on my knees and rip the dandelions out with my teeth. Not just me. The group of us. Bend down, they said. Your teeth, they said.

Then the sky is not in your clouds. And if the wings are not firmly attached to the mind and the armrest grown restless, recline. When the blue-suited voice of reason asks if you want the whole can and ice with that and not if you'd like her back, you can see how nothing is securely fastened.

If you were really dead, thought Harlan about Toland-in-Heaven, I would let you go. Then while I was at it, I would sort into shapes I could understand, all your difficult disguises. There are so many. I would hold your death in my heart and sharpen on it. Where we used to go to be alone, I would hold apart us together.

There was something about the way Toland just hung there in the closet that suggested to Harlan she had for him some very good news. Is it my hair?, she asked. Harlan looked at its fetish of brown loops and decided it was not, after all, her hair that made him think she had for him some very good news. Is it my wrists?

Suppose the night tasted like sugar and the streetlamps chimed the hour, would Flemish and French slang still matter? I was a little in love with you. The man scouring the Sunday market for vintage postcards. The child wailing after a drifting balloon. You made me forget how to count. But we danced flawlessly, our shadows spreading on the Belgian cobbles where tiny grasses grow in between.

I wake up, and you are already gone. Every morning it's like this: my eyes flick open, and this punches me into the day…

Listen, friend, there is a proper way to hold the warehouse when its walls have been blown out like this, and it sits there, dumb in the field. Like so: imaginary sphere, bundle of noise. We are sitting; I'm wishing for a table to mark our spot in the hilly grass, and that's when we get the sudden feeling that we are to stand, that we are to do something, really do something, like torch our possessions and gather all the humanoid figures in the wood grain of the cabinets in Nancy's kitchen into a single line of sight, singing softly, little dirge as the day ends.

I would tell you this directly. I would assemble a presentation of Polaroids and morals, protract the particular angles of her refraction. Serve canapés and arias and make allusions to a definition rooted in shape: the deltoid, the ellipse.

Lacking an alphabet to appropriate this flexure (which is where she maunders): a fable whose protagonist is light, the outskirts of an oral tradition, these are anxieties indigenous to our region.

She couldn't resist the beauty of wood grain in floorboards so she spent days resting there, pooled out and bled in like a spill.

When the body does something right, a happiness gathers above and behind its left shoulder.

The body, sensing the happiness, knows not to catch it

but knows not that the happiness too knows not to catch the body, which as it happens feels more acutely feelings located outside itself;

For a few moments in the deep overcast of late afternoon, the creek-bank ferns and my Gatorade glowed the same green. The light from the Earth goes out into space, hits the sun, and makes it shine.

When I say, "I can feel the toxins in my brain," I know I'm wrong. There are no nerves in the brain. But the sentence itself is toxic.

Swiss, great-grandmother says "blood" to the row of the riverboat gently covering its tracks. Father defends their western terms, "I'm no wagon, no horse." Anchored—land, land ho—grandfather's in the motor, radio, hull, in the rain. Aunt J says "he touched it, it's ruined" and pops bread from a bread pan. Uncles talk Canada, a state away, with its good hunting, fishing.

The waves, as if they were ashamed, roll up to it tentatively, and just before they reach the shore, they turn back.

On the treadmill, he did not know if he was walking forward or backward. It was the same when he was stopped in traffic and the cars started to move and his car seemed to be drifting backward and he slammed on the breaks.

181: Wooden hearted and dumb: Clearly he is referencing that terrible translation he loved so much of Valentroika's Russian epic, "Uncle Winter," in which the author melodes that "when my mother's voice grew unheard my heart/became cold as wood/laid in the ground for millennia."

It is well documented that the author obsessed over the untimely sickness of his mother in a manner similar to other pre-debauchist outlawed writers such as E. A. Poe, even going so far as to refer to himself as such.

In this episode of angels, a mortal couple strolls, hand in hand, down a hall, around a corner on a cruise ship when a door shuts, a gas leaks, and a frantic couple is sealed in a tunnel, in a vessel…