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
not fifty seconds before or twenty-six after but right when the big finger hits sharp on the twelve and little on the six that’s when he opens his eyes and starts the morning mechanics stretch yawn piss dress teeth out of their jar back in his head bed made—corners hospital sharp Then he’s … Continue reading Momentary Inertia
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
Of Wings and Worms They form a circle on the edge of the neighborhood, a flock of females in designer sweat suits, leaving her to stare down the soft gullets of their hoods. I sit outside their circumference on a bench, still leaking weeks later A slow-drip —of … Continue reading Of Wings and Worms *rewrite
*****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
I saw you today. Knew it was you from the smoke sign snaking from the window of your canary-yellow SUV at 6 a.m. A borrowed car from a borrowed life. You—never a fan of sports or yellow, or utilitarian in any sense of the word. Still a sign—like an ancient indian signal of … Continue reading Blind Intersection
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
Side by side, we enter separate time zones. You Australia, me—Japan. We are in the same room but still separated by a cloud of pixels—billions of free-floating information particles we cycle in and out between us like air. We are like twin pupae forming in the blue incandescence. We’ve grown, attached to the same … Continue reading Phototaxis
