The 18th century bawd who sells her daughter’s virginity to an Earl. The tired CIA operative who says, “just do it,” then half a village dies. The plantation owner’s wife. The lonely CEO of the pharmaceutical company who screams like a banshee when an...
Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of boats: boats of prisoners, boats cracking under sky-iron, boats making corpses bloom like algae on the shore. Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of the bombed mosque. There was the apocalypse of the taxi...
To have arrived here, weighed down with fistfuls of calendar entries, unsuitably boggle-eyed as if new— so these are mountains, there is horror, which is the subway line where I may lay down my creed and when will my breath stop acidulating like this? Exceed, said 27. In...
every night an ancient priest gives me advice and in the morning I’m all alone with nothing a universe I don’t want to bother you or to upend the universe but your realtors are getting a divorce
the dark is the dark the wind the sound of the ocean all relative to the sensitivity of a tiny chain of bones leading up to or...
Neighbor, your mower cast dust over the edge where the field meets the field, toy-sized ring- necked snakes halved and flattened by blades among blades, and now our things are mingled. What do you covet that is mine? Chigger- riddled passion blooms, a glint of beetles loitering under their anther eaves, a car idling...
Have psalter and breviary. Have hymnbook. Have laid fingers on rosary strings, plucked like lyres their clatterwood. Coughed incense. Adored precisely as instructed. Stood Passiontide vigil, then sexted at noon. Cast bone die to prophesy dyings, told beads their more sorrowful mysteries. Rehallowed insomnia to Compline then...
People like to mock my town, they mock it for being too provincial and too boring and it’s true, not much of import happens here but I don’t mind. Some people say, when they are asked what they like about Palmerston North, that you can...
End of the day. A bar where you ought to leave a tip. The green bird was saying pretty pretty pretty, loved ones were walking home across the city. I waved at the girl who waves her whip ... but please be certain I’m a...