Issue 108

And because I’m a taker by nature, / I am suspicious, exhausted, on guard / against tax refunds, friendships, erasures

Sometimes I wish God / would have loved the world less and kept his son.

The dog / rests her head on my knee. A person is not like a god. / A person is not like a dog.

from where I was broken I could not flee.

When my mother said
Linda
and looked that look, I could

see it all before me.

One second he was riding on the river and the next he was in it, watching his canoe float away upside down, its silvery hull a bright line on the dark river.

Our blood sugar was so high that our wounds
had stopped healing. We were either a tapestry
of Band-Aids or very careful.

The racetrack, famously built before we knew of such things, straddled a fault line at the joint of two very active plates. As a result, fissures spread through the walls of the old grandstand like capillaries. The world was tearing it apart naturally.

I’m waiting for that strange experience when a picture speaks, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes with a shout, sometimes with a reverberating silence that pulls me to the edge of a precipice where I’m not sure whether I’ll fall or fly.