January 2011
13 posts
3 tags
The Soldier
December
The first snow of the year never lasts. It usually starts with a few flakes dancing on the air like campfire ash, then graduates to a heavier pattern. I like when it slants. I like when it straightens, when it thickens, makes the world into a snow globe. I take the quilt from the bed and wrap it around myself, the pathetic old king with his robes trailing him across the floor...
Herman Melville Likes Your Beard
towirr:
Or as he calls them, in order, in two chapters of White Jacket:
beards
the crop
suburbs of the chin
homeward-bounders
fly-brushes
long, trailing moss hanging from the bough of some aged oak
love-curls
Winnebago locks
carroty bunches
rebellious bristles
redundant mops
yellow bamboos
long whiskers
thrice-noble beards
plantations of hair
whiskerandoes
nodding harvests
viny...
3 tags
This Is Running Like a Mad Groundhog
This day, this life, is suddenly running like a mad groundhog. Pastoral slowness abandoned to this mad dash to cross the killer road. Ducking under lightly guarded, soft metal barriers, Invading the concrete expanse, Exploding to the other side. This day, this life, is suddenly running With a groundhog’s mad, wild abandon. Like a pair of hairy wings with glazed eyeballs. Like a pair of muscled...
1 tag
3 tags
Amaryllis Snow
Veined orange blooms – nice against the drab winter grass. Snow brings loveliness.
- Margaret Robinson
3 tags
Existential Mouse
Each night, in the bait spot, a walnut wedge, peanut butter, cheese.
Every morning for a week, droppings in the drawer, home only to paring knives while
the spring is thwapped, eats gone, no corpse in sight. Existential dread refuses to be caught,
naps by day, rises up the sink pipe after dark to snack on what I set out in my deep
need to have done with it – scaly feet, twitching whiskers,...
3 tags
AIR-O-PLANE
In “The Letter,” Alex Chilton gravels out “Air-O-Plane.” He wants a ticket. So do you—to fly
where you’ll be handsome, bright, and athletic. You pop pimples. The song’s
under two minutes long. The last verse got cut from the single—
the plane crashes. You wish you had been on it. Instead, you face Geometry.
- Kenneth Pobo
3 tags
SWING
Well, we have to begin somewhere, right? Of course not! Don’t begin. Or end. And avoid the middle— where demons diaper the dead. Think of yourself as a swing. You’re in mid-air, nobody pushing. Somebody should be sitting on you. You were made for that. But you make a small wind shiver as you near clouds.
- Kenneth Pobo
1 tag
3 tags
The Ear
We knew the family was in trouble, when our sister, Helen, starting putting bologna on the walls. Helen told us that Winston Churchill was living in her left ear. We believed she was joking. Winston Churchill living in her ear was by far better than bologna on the walls. An ear infection no doubt had spread to her brain. That’s what we thought. We were convinced the medicine produced her...
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Surprises
Why is it so surprising, even today, to learn that a girl paraded naked in front of a window looking out on the ball field?
And even today, why is it surprising to find that the boy pulled her naked body hard against his?
And even now, why is it a surprise that he blew the candle’s flame with such force the curtain instantly turned orange shooting in the air, singeing the girl’s long...
3 tags
Bewitched Water
Catharine watched the murky brown river from the window of her new home, a three-storey brick on New Castle’s historic register. She had dreamed of owning one of these storybook houses along the Delaware River. On the weekends, she’d come to read on a public bench, and when student papers accumulated or the weather was cold or wet, like this gray late September day, she’d go into one of the...