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DeathI’m afraid to say anything or nothing, I’m white & unalterably broken.
The dead cowards my parents on a tear through the goddamn fields.
All diseases were conquered. Death was an adventure for volunteers.
I don’t want fiction. What I want is truth. Or someone’s version of it.
Human language, Winston thought, was not adequate for spiritual union.
There was no sense in brushing off or any other civilized thing.
I shoved them one by one, easy as pie yet with care, just shy of mercy.
History howls for direction so I remind him how the hero was lost.
Certainly the ushers who pass the baskets know me as a miser.
We take our solace, in a time of malaise and mourning, in the close-at-hand.
You will be a broke blues man with only some story of how you were.
Ghosts are real. This much I know. It’s the living that give me trouble.
My grandfather committed my grandmother to a mental asylum.
Felicia knew why he was there. He was waiting. Waiting for her.
Tongue, eye, nose—which has the shortest route to the brain, heart?
I can see on him how things are changing for and against us.
For all the stories they’d concocted, the real one electrified them.
How much simpler and more satisfying was the company of men.
I needed a paycheck a lot more than I needed to be kissed.
My bike, my skinny body, my pent breath was thrown to the grass.
She remembers that golden ocean, the promise of a whole new land.
She remembers that golden ocean, the promise of a whole new land.
We are going south where I know that my father is going to die.
When he was a child, my father had a cousin who was buried by a plow.
The stones here carry the island’s low cry inside them. A landlocked grief.
The animals are dying. All the beautiful women are dying too.
I want to say hold these harp strings steady atop the tallest summit.
What if my mother could have been happy if I hadn’t been born?
Crows rasp from branches, scatter debris across unfinished plots.
Always I obliged the urban tree, any speechless unblessed nature.