Issue 117

I know no other way to love you than to hurt you

If heaven exists and I’m not saying it does / I don’t imagine rolling hills flowery meadows

I do not know / where pleasure leads,

black-robed Death never closer / with cartoon scythe and cardboard eyes.

WHEN SOMEBODY DIES, I WATCH MOVIES. The day my grandmother passed, I sat at the altar with the brothers in The Darjeeling Limited. Watching Adrien Brody embody the sense of utter emptiness left by his character’s father’s death somehow helped get me a little closer to my own experience, though I couldn’t articulate it to anyone…

The toddlers maintain / zucchini, sing the songs / only they and those closer to the earth // Understand.

Midwestern reticence is respect for the unspeakable, the unknowable. What we do and what is done, to each other, to ourselves. What do you say to the flood, the tower, the burning bush?

I don’t consume saliva, I consume You

Have you seen God yet / how he’s rushing to arrive on time by two thirty / responsibility responsibility