Articles

We were traveling in Melbourne Australia back in January of 2018. The location was at the entrance to the Melbourne Museum of Art. The image was made looking through a window that had water running down on the outside.

It’s a myth our nails keep growing after we die. I remember my mother’s final manicure, a hot pink gel that didn’t even chip when she fell on her concrete porch, still looked perfect a week later when we laid her in her coffin.  At the hospital, nobody told us she was dying.

It has been some months since Grace and I had dinner out. Our infant has been at our throats. Yesterday a shower of objects flew our way from the spare room. The day before that, we were unceremoniously thrown out trying to put it to sleep.

FADE IN:

On a SHED, painted black. We move inside to find a pail of green blood
and a SNAPPING TURTLE, twisting on a hook.

in the morning after

Lady Horikawa wrote about her tangled hair

later the poet ordained as a nun

The day they installed my mother’s catheter was the day of her defeat. Mine too, as would be revealed in time. It still amazes me that such a small device could undo us both; could reveal the limits of care and point the way, for me at least, to a new sensibility. 

Against an achromatic morning sky
in the pewter kink of a scrub oak limb
a gray squirrel, tensed in a quivering coil.

I jump out of bed,
leave to one side the objects
I accumulate
like the Egyptians
thinking they’ll protect me

A small plane moves above the coastline
dragging a banner with drawings
and words hard to make out
under the wind.

you obey disobedience
that benign fever
                                 rooted in twilight
you don’t transcend the tin funnel
where grace gushes