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“Okay but what’s Sami?” Sometimes I take a breath, Make myself say the word Lapp— Then half the time they still don’t know. I’ve said it for nothing. Sometimes I find A way to say, in the far north. So they understand (but don’t care). Once I told a small child, “The reindeer people, sweetheart,” […]
nidikumba (that you may sleep each night soundly; that your nipples might flush fertile in the clutch of your matelove’s firstborn; that their fingers might furl feather quiet in your fist in the dark; that blossoms may light your bare feet to the ocean each morning, thorning your soles and begging that you tread gentle, […]
We step through mirrors and take you away. Don’t be afraid, it’s just business. Your soul or an eye, a lifetime or a night. You’ll be washed of your old fragrances: the midnight trysts and false promises, the cash payments and casual heartbreaks. The room where we’ll take you has a mirror. Peer […]
. . . the word not even Vergil knew, who died with his work unfinished. —Ursula K. Le Guin, “Learning Latin in Old Age” From his fever in Brundisium he visits like the wavering in bronze scratched grave-bound across its gods and heroes, the worried wick of a face still breathing light. Ceaseless as […]
I met a woman on the platform, handbag pressed tight To her chest like it might protect her. She kept her distance, And I’m not one to converse uninvited with the damned, Even when we share a fate. “Long day,” she sighed first, And I replied, “Long day.” (Or was it the echo of a third […]
They’re just now getting used to not having to be seen all the time, you know. When the first woman goes into the dressing room, she imagines that she’s drowning, that fabric will try to eat her whole just like her designer said it would, that maybe she should get used to being a soft […]
after Sinead Overbye the way the days are peeling away now is the same way they did before we got here. yesterday, i bumped into a drone at a festival. its face, a telegram from my great grandfather. & because there’s a synchronous touch to events, the moments come to us unseparated. in this […]
We found our way by braiding constellations, using our hair to map the stars as sung by those mournful voices carried across field winds. “Canaan,” they cried. And though we could not know the way for certain, we hoped for angels for chariots for […]
she saved her money to buy a thirty-minute trip back in time to visit the diner where she could watch her grandpa young with a head full of hair working behind the counter as she ate a piece of his maple apple pie with coffee the piece she ordered to-go traveled fifty years ahead […]
I don’t want flying cars. I want my language back. I want to glass-bottom boat my way to a dirt road with no street signs, squeeze myself on the grave of my restlessness, my atomic self-esteem. Five hundred years and we have finished. What have burned sugar and dyed cotton blighted? I […]
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