Month: October 2017

Off screen my father’s son role casts him to me in word, Dad: that one syllable gold bath bubble reopening our shared half brother tunnel where I listen to what was till the pop: I hear me gun it in neutral I hear darling let’s date now, sandpaper these big flaws into smaller echoes for subsequent lovers since the past as likely to scurry as a post from its fencing but memory little more than story we hum into the cerebrum boomeranging as joy and/or misery. To make it make-belief believe it is so imagination a world (running along...

The day we  moved into our  little quad on  the bottom  floor of an art deco building, the first thing we unpacked was the turntable and speakers, the three-foot tall suckers you’d inherited  from  your parents, which doubled  as end  tables for the  two years  we spent there.  I  draped  them  in white  lace,  topped  each  with  a  red  glitter  candelabra, and vintage ashtrays. We  unrolled a kilim rug to sleep on. We ate tofu in black pepper  sauce on the floor and talked about  what to do  with the screened in  porch. Everyone else had string lights,  but...

Basic alchemy sign: a star inside a square inside a circle. When I trace shapes in sand, nothing happens; Dad and I never went to the beach together. If I sketch the sign on wallpaper, his Autocad drawings fill up my notebook—how to reroute a gas line, how to build a footbridge out of rubber. When I tattoo a star inside a square on my thigh, white blood cells make new shapes in my irises: a catcher’s glove, a hospital bed, the word gold in one eye and the word marrow in the...

O, unwanted messenger. Vagabond Hermes, herald of flesh. First fraction of the body to awaken with the sun. O, hubris of blood’s architecture. Tower of Babel, believing itself for any tongue. O, thumb & forefinger encircling you, a strange wedding band. The body’s proposal. How you present this skin-dowry. Vein-oath. Offer forth a face -less suitor for this temporary union. How you would call this gender—a veil. My flesh —dance of illusions. Wed this body as man -wife. Cock-bride. You name me Salome, my skin ribbons into silk. I will dance down to bones & ask for your...