Hel on a Headland
Yclept Hel I am the get of gods, the graft of a giantess. Born of steam, of smog, of striving piston. Spawn of the stride of the connecting rod. Such are the stresses and falls of my song. My sire is […]
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Poetry
To Whomsoever Remains
as I write this I am catching up on the news and the news was about nothing at all, the usual flames rising up from the cracks of everything we know, nothing special, but randomly I noticed in the B-roll there was this little slice of a clip of a soldier walking past a bakery […]
Temperance and The Devil, Reversed
It begins with running, always the same bone-white panic— running from something bigger than yourself, this story told and retold, until it shapeshifts into something Other, and it chases you like a wolf. Unkindness arrives in a whirl of black songs, a triumph made of feathers unfurling like frost across glass, delicate and beautiful, disarming, […]
Driving Downtown
the other side breathes quiet i hear many people have left but the town isn’t completely dead yunno alive but in ways that make you think zombies think weevil-holed bean seeds think half-healed bruises leaking pints of blood […]
The Witch Makes Her To-Do List
Check on the frogs in the pond, especially the one with the crooked leg, who can’t hop as far as the others. Ask them how they are doing, whether the dragonflies are plentiful this year, if any of them have turned into princes lately. They always croak at that, which is their way of laughing. […]
The Credo of Loplop
Beneath the grattage of his dapper Dada I will always believe in the red-headed bird-king’s beak, a cardinal decalcomania peeling from the seams of his degenerate artist’s coat. When he fled his bare-feathered nest to sculpt the high desert, he was collaged already with childhood’s talons and quills. Solarized, enrobed in a lover’s ambiguity, he […]
The Hole Thing
Now, let us gather to imagine the future. Here, in the Central Hall of Arts and Sciences as it was, before Victoria laid the first stone. Here, where the dead were annually raised, implored, exhorted, ectoplasmically embraced, Here, where Hiawatha musically wed, and Os-Ke-Non-Ton sang the medicine man, to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s once-loved score, Here where […]
Kannazuki, or the Godless Month
The moments turned in an instant; flash of anger in the eyes, sheen of a black gun barrel, safety off, bullets fired and fired and fired. The gods are not with us, they began traveling to Izumo. We all wanted food before we lost everything—sense of touch, taste, smell, the light inside our eyes dimming […]
Love Poem: Phoenix
after Donika Kelly I see your eyes last, before dust. In any new required birth, what remains: plumage gold and striking, the black plucked skin beneath, palimpsested trial. Love, I would sing to you every blazing star, every hunted ballad that burnishes. I would make a burnishing[1] of […]
A Testament of Bloom
everyone thinks i dodged a bullet, i think i shot the gun. —Greg Laswell i don’t think pain is the only thing i inherited from my mother. yesterday, i was another shade of a zephyr and with every place i grazed, soliloquies replaced the emptiness i’ve always carried. frail/ grey/ the evening news/ […]
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