prose poem: results 1–24 of 59

Watched the dark come on, landing on rooftops, the civility of apartment windows & streetlights emerging with it, accompanying it like some harmony, which could only be imagined, or painted, by a Whistler, say, as far away from Lowell as he could get…

The minutes were read and we dealt with all at hand: the Club tea, Wright and his "Black Boy," alms to the poor, and the Urban League's request that all Negroes stay away from the State Fair.

The fisherman threatens to climb philodendrons with daisy cutters. Threatens to mount his motorbike barebacked. Ursula emerges from behind stacked bricks. Like hyenas they thrash in ghetto-rage.

In 1972 Stephen Hawking postulated the existence of bone-crushing black holes where nothing could escape, not even a gizzard, or light. Hawking has changed his mind. Now he proposes that information can escape, a radiation of a peculiar sort, one that can transmit bursts of black light like a Britney Spears concert.

Because his penis was there in my hand as a butter knife would have been in my hand if I was about to butter bread. I wasn't about to butter bread or say no but I was happy nonetheless. It was a little weapon, a toy.

What was it like?

It was like he wouldn't listen to me but listening to me the way our father would listen to us with his eyes closed nodding yay ya, yay ya.

In the morning my face wears wrinkles. Pants face. Sleepy pants. Face of demonic possession and lack of caffeine. God then is the sound of the faucet, the coffee dripping.

For hope, we blended myths with our known truths. We knew the hair of the dead continued to grow, but did buried babies learn to talk? We grew confused. Am I a horse or a crow? My grandfather was a grave so I am a grave.

In my bureau is a matchbox. I am not going to make this easy for you. In the box there are two cloves, a snip of lavender, and a piece of ribbon. Inside the ribbon, a girl walks tiptoe with outstretched arms past the living room. She is my grandmother. In her pocket…

We've come to expect disillusion and madness where before there had been simply chiffon.

don't need much room. forty acres would have been too much. just need a corner of a corner to rest my eyes between shifts. will not be distracted by women or love or necessity of the loins.

Darling, please do not touch me. Every time you do I throw up and lose my fat belly.

You were drinking water from the tap. As you spit into the basin, a woman came out of the stall. She pushed your head down, held it under the tap…

i guess i'm poor at the whittling, longish fingers make oak into sparrow, i tend to rub elm smooth & pretend forests & birdsongs when i should dig the knife in…

She begins with tiny spoons and screws. Swallows safety pins and penny nails by the dozen. Paperclips, thumbtacks, saltshaker tops. The doctors say it's dire, prescribe lithium and fresh air. Her mother cries and brings cake.

Your mother calls on what would have been your 24th birthday. Yanking each word from the flowerbed of her gut…

I woke up thinking there were beautiful people under the covers. I woke up thinking beauty had followed me home in the form of an economical soap. If only…

This is eternal, this lack of skill and know-how, this devout, this impractical, this inoculated pink and golden dawn, one or two languages in bed, a desk, a bureau, a table, two or three chairs. I stayed awake. I stayed among…

A bagful of nickels in exchange for a bagful of black detergent that smelled of sliced oranges. They even shook on it.

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…

Tennessee Williams once visited Manhattan where he celebrated the Broadway success of A Streetcar Named Desire with a leather purse.

10. Do grapes feel that sweet while crushing them barefoot? Should I have made love like she did—sticky, swelled, then bursting?

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.

You spend the last part of the party in the laundry rubbing salt into wine splotches on your shirt, thinking, even the stone painted like a ladybug, even the slug made of Christmas lights, even rusted bicycle wheels soldered to spikes? This is not party talk about landscape…

You are no dumb chimp, smacking white on ultramarine, mars black on white, a stroke of crimson somewhere in between to mimic an inferno. You didn't knock over the brushes or try to eat them…