prose poem: results 25–48 of 102

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…

Hard work facilitates sexual identification. Hardly against false epiphanies. I'll be solid ground; you be top of the world. I'll be down to earth; you be rising above. You be rising up.

The reality of your spine will not render response an anthem. The more one depicts, the greater lack is felt. We begin at the base and set out on a skyward tracking stroke.

The bondsman wouldn't touch him, and when they bring him up, shuffling and handcuffed, you almost don't recognize your man. He looks beat. Meek. Maybe make-believe, like something's just gone off inside him. You're in the court of common pleas, but it feels to you like a lot of sermonizing, all mystical and official, all ritual, all well-oiled wood.

You're ripped and he's a little lit and on a whim you've crossed two states to get hitched. Right away it's clear the justice of the peace doesn't like the story here, and before he'll tie the knot, he says, he's got to ask about your breeding. What people you're from. What they might have to say about all this.

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.