Articles

Son’s / net-/ works / / veins under / the skin / of the dark / / call / see/ knock! / / a chandelier / glows / in the dark

He then went on, as if he were reading from a script, which I realized later he was, to list my severance package, which wouldn’t get me through the new year. It took me a second to realize someone from HR was in the office with him.

Our bare hands redden as we work, / he high on the ladder cutting the old / connections, and I drilling / outlet hole through the siding.

Yusef is so taken with the woman in black that he stares at her as she makes her way to the back of the van, and he forgets himself, and Iordannis has to remind him to start the van. Yusef decides right then and there that he will have her picture.

Our society is grappling with a soul-sickness that is ultimately an infection of our imagination. An election may address symptoms, but how do we treat the underlying disease? How to heal the imagination? Perhaps this is what the arts are for.

And my flesh, my body, held

the kingdom of God, and if it’s a place that’s a place
for children, then most of what I know really doesn’t matter.

You carry our son in a locket
you hang around your neck

each morning, a way, I guess,
of carrying what isn’t and what is

In my mind,

my son cannot be nowhere, and yet I cannot imagine
where he is, except here, growing older inside me.”

The counselor says that I am in the romance phase. She is right. I am in love with heroin and with the needle, the whole ritual, in love even with the bruises on my arms.

You are two atomized
in one, our molecules
become wild air that whims
the world…