editors' select: results 1–24 of 49

That's when Wallace will come out of the backroom, the paint hangar, I call it. He'll wipe his hands on a turpentine rag and he'll smell like noxious chemicals. He'll give you a big grin and a waggle of his rug-like brown eyebrows. You'll like him right away because his face is cleaner than mine and he looks glad to see you. You'll expect him to ask if he can help you. He'll walk right up to you and you'll extend your right hand for him to shake. He'll put the paint rag in your palm.

Your laundry on the line like a giant, breathing beast,
like the billowing sheets above the alleys in Trastevere,

where mothers yell after their children Vieni qua! Vieni qua!
while underwear sways like language itself. Rippling and tossing…

Barefoot under a borrowed poncho, we touch
(misused synapse to misused synapse)

but wonder where are the fucking marshmallows?

And what hope does an average girl have when the gossip's
already turned her into a cold-blooded pariah, a bitch deluxe?

A spurned lover here, a few premenstrual days there and I'm
gorgonizing men in their tracks like some monster from the lochs.

One-bedroom apartments feel unnecessarily large with just one person in them. Who knows, I may be renting my own studio soon, or staying in this big apartment by myself 'til the lease runs out. But I doubt, despite what Sue may want, that I'll be getting a new job anytime soon.

Curious are the ways
holiness is achieved (that freezing
and melting point, that instant
when your perfect attention changes
and unchanges you or the world) and unforeseen
the consequences.

Say the black road
is a bleached crest raveling

the one distance
meant for you (all of us).

We took turns pointing at all the girls who would scream.
You couldn't watch so you smoked,
occasionally glancing up at this pirate ship.

Sometimes you feel you've a touch of the broken heart,
when the orchid of evening wilts into nighttime,
when the darkness is not yet deep.

When you are tipsy with the grief of his leaving…

So that this will seem like words between
old friends, I'll say it was painless.
And quick. I'll say it was mercy
and behind my face where I put
things like The Truth and dreams…

Bellefontaine: a town on the way to somewhere else, a place
where you run out of gas, stop to make love on a picnic table

somewhere by the wheat field—when, toward magic hour, the boy
already loaded the gun, the smell of bacon wafting outside…

bliss

comes lightly and leaves

quickly, leaves nothing

much behind.

& if he died I would hold love

in the cracks below the heart, a caged

hand waiting to enfold its animal…

The little mouse has claimed the kitchen, spread out like a rind,

and under the cedar beam is you: a tent, sturdy as that—with people through the slit

that mimics a shy face in profile

determined not to full-on.

For my calling I crawl,
vermin-like, through a glade with a battalion of burnt
tanks, their guns every which-way, matchsticks.

In the big fun
disaster, I revisit every place

we loved one another and cry, I fall
asleep to the same song in the back of a Jeep
night after night…

There's a moment in every dog's life
when it surrenders its dogginess

to a greater good…

I have stood beside you, saying this, as you reach into the cupboard for another stack of dry noodles. You eat them with the dead still on, with the sticky deadness still on…

When Alethea came over after school she wanted to know if my grandmother was a witch.

A likeness or delineation. Or. The application of Light to the purpose of Representation. Rather. The smallest reduction of the largest pyramid. And. The largest enlargement of the smallest microbe. An underwater waterlog of the sawfish in swim. For.

During the long holiday of 1978, a man named Petrovesky came to live in our neighbourhood. Petrovesky was a giant who always wore a long black coat and carried a short black cane with a gold tip. He had a long nose, big blue eyes and a red beard that reached all the way down to his knees. He also had giant wings…

I watch the hound drape
a dead me with a red robe

instruct my child in morals,
correct my ethical shortcomings.

"Would you still love me if I were frozen?" my brother asks from beneath his covers.

"I would still love you even if you were an electric dog," I murmur from across the room; the room I hate to describe.

The day my brother brought me to the pond
of one thousand screaming white swans

it was winter in Akita.