Faith, Disbelief, life, art…and the Desert in between
In August they appear shimmering in the highway haze. Metal caravans refracting the sun. They set up in plain view. In parking lots or the rented dirt of fair grounds. By nightfall they’re up, red lights running, the kind of cheap attraction built to go up as quickly as it comes down. The crowds wander … Continue reading Temporary Attractions
On Saturdays, she stays inside to wipe away the residue of the work-week, covering every surface of the house like dust. She scrubs and scours every seam, in between feeding machines constant cycles of dirty then clean. All the while, she knows, in the kitchen, fruit on the counter is going soft in spots and … Continue reading The Composition of Dust
He carries out the nightly ritual ordained by his mother by embracing whoever's there. He moves among us through the incense of nicotine like a little priest in a pair of hopeful spiderman pajamas. He tiptoes over the empty beer bottles and bowls of cigarette butts to lay his damp head on our thighs and … Continue reading Repentance
After seven years of silence —a soft mumble of an email. I miss you. More of a murmur in sleep than a conscious sentiment. But we were never friends. More like refugees huddled together trying to survive the same war. Waiting in blown-out rooms for our men to return from the torn … Continue reading The Taste of Paper
*****This was a commission piece I wrote for the composer, Eric Whitacre, about the birth of his son. In Exordium I picture you as a deep sea diver, an ocean astronaut floating, still formless, in the darkness of the deep. anchored by a thread through which I am divided into simple single cells, dissolved into … Continue reading In Exordium
37 degrees is the temperature a normal body holds. She woke up cold beside him and already knew. He stared up blinkless--dust already forming on his pupils. She filled him again and again, punching in time to the tinny disconnect of the speakerphone counting with her: one and two and three and four and five. She pauses, ear to mouth … Continue reading 37 degrees
All that remains is the marble of your back as you lie on your side asleep like a fallen column on bed sheets stretching out between us like forty years of Sinai sand. I read the ridge of your spine skimming the braille of vertebrae for something buried deep as memory You shift … Continue reading The Wailing Wall
In a windowless room, our shirts pushed up over the elbows, in order to touch the bottom without getting wet. Feeling in the muck, through the foreign food bodies, for the soft stick of forks and the smooth underbelly of spoons. The mist from the sprayer slicks every surface to a dangerous sheen. … Continue reading The Consumer and the Consumed
