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Do they ever discover new colors? He asks me.
He spends all of his time in cells so drab
no colors describe that emptiness.

I stand on grey cobblestone, my thighs pressed against a black iron railing, staring at a square of grass. This is my first visit to Tower Green, the plot of earth within the Tower of London where two English queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard—both seemingly my first cousins sixteen times removed—are said to have been executed. Here in this fortress, I become a kind of medium, conjuring the ghosts of these women in whose lives I see my own reflected—a gay man who has known the scaffold, who has fought to find his place.

then the scent of the chlorine seeps beneath the glass
doors into winter.
If dinner simmers
on the stove into summer, spring, fall. If

In late 2015, I wrote a prose poem, “Beryllium.” For the Bellingham Review special section, I decided to translate the poem into a handmade one-edition, sewing all 61 words of the poem onto 3”x2” pieces of fabric. I wanted the handmade book to have the tactility of Louise Bourgeois’ Ode â l’oubli.

Before the rabbits and The Burning Hills. Before freedom and Girl Scout cookies and a shining tooth. Before bed sores and Conquering the Darkness.

My brother will meet me at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix and from there he will drive me to Scottsdale Memorial Hospital, where my father, apparently, is dying. Apparently, as I use it here, is a technical term; my parents are devout Christian Scientists, and for them apparently indicates an appearance which the world regards as true but which they consider false.

Our mother told us that if the headlights
which, nightly, swept the blackened
bedroom walls, were to halt, to stall
and hover above your pillow, throw their halos
over your head, your bed, you would be taken
in your sleep that night,

swiveling in from the ends to the hot nested scalp, it was meant to be yes, August,
this is what is happening when she busses the lather close.

spines, whole tunnel columns
knit out to carapace,
we muscle the chlorine up into
orange-hot cloud cover

An Empyrean eye, giant and lashless, its celestial iris filled with sky. Called The False Mirror, Georgette regards it more as two-way. Man Ray owned it from 1933 to 1936, and said the painting “sees as much as it itself is seen.”