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Art is a way for the mind to master the body, even if it is not one’s own.

I was nagged by those boxes from my old life stacked in the garage.

Then I graduate to a four-digit mortgage inside an ornate gate.

A real or imagined boundary, crossed. End of the line. Lined out.

Oar blades, vast swirls of cirrus at dawn. The dead move within us.

He folds on himself like a sheet kicked off the foot of a bed.

He smelled like the bars my mother took me to in the middle of the day.

One makes one’s peace with words in a poem and space in a dream.

You can call it karma if you can see that far, or joy-begets-sorrow.

We’ve seen a lot of smaller ranches bought up by outside money.

I used to be known for the humor of my music, the lightness of touch.

Every life is an imperfect continuation of another.

I was once a rider of mastodons, a waitress showing skin.

All down my street the new fathers beat the kingness out of the kings.

Our crowns are made of dead hair and get swept out with the trash.

The men here don’t know where to place me, call me exotic grail.

Her sly smile was a vicious remnant of her life before Real Life began.

The past is never done with. It begs to be fed, demands to be eaten.

Pale dust clung to their skin like the lime he had thrown on the dead.

I floated in the tub, my head bobbing, until I felt slick as a seal.

For a moment I had the delicious feeling of fitting in without even trying.

She had learned that it was easy to get Sylvi to do things.

The world is where we brace for a joke that’s about to be played on us.

Descent jumps and jostles, nausea drops me back to the floodplain.

She offered her face up for what should be a brotherly kiss.

She’d lifted the plot from a TV show she’d watched the night before.

She looks in the mirror above the sink, and her image makes eye contact.

Nothing was permanent, no friend I made, no math test I took.

Rise the Euphrates, my first novel, grew out of a feverish dream.

Kenny Wade makes do with short-term schemes and part-time work.