Issue 98

for MC Under a blue tent with someone else’s name on it Sweeney and her name was not Sweeney We saw a marble urn, your mother was in it Let the baby rest a flower on her ledge A white rose on a square urn —Wedge to eternity— While we rose and sank with words…

—-My fee for appearing in one of your dreams is fifty cents a night. No fee at all for appearing as a cloud but think of me please when you wake. As for angels, the illustrator must be paid for her artistry. Her pen tip is sharp. Her ink is blood. She draws directly on…

A plain-bellied snake waits near the bridge in the park. Her body is gray and heavy. Her skin looks to feel of hard fruit packed with sand. For two days, her body moves like a nightmare: once quick swim into the lake, once shifts so small I think my mind is full of tricks. Creeping…

Think of your parents before you. First children themselves, fourth graders when Kennedy was shot. Half of you inside your mother, even then. Months away from a first confession. Then meeting by chance in a drive-in parking lot, your future father mistaking your mother for some other girl with long black hair. And with one…

for Bronisław Anlen The stones are gathering And who was supposed to come Where there is stone upon stone it’s because they’re familiar Here a stone says kaddish with its weight its multitude and stones the place in the painless grass The stones are gathering Here sometimes an old man will lug inside him feldspar…

She had nothing but eyes she hadn’t yet grown into inside them quite by chance two stars of David that a tear might extinguish so she wept Her speech was not silver worth at least some spit a turn of the head her weeping speech full of hunchbacked words so she stopped speaking Her silence…

It’s probably right here out of the ripe moon rising that a pit fell once (because it isn’t just the moon’s other side we don’t know but also its pit) and that’s what started the apricot orchards outside Varna. Down sits the black-bearded gardener, God the father with the planets in his basket, and bites…

Americans are almost conscious of this fact often we shut consciousness down like closing a shop, pulling down the iron grate like putting up the keep-out signs What I mean by somewhere else is some other continent from which we traveled by boat or jet or desperate rail or bleeding feet And what I mean…

When we are born thirst makes us cry thirst surges through our arteries when the hormones hit when we start to wither our thirst necessarily increases for the tongue of touch the dictionary of rain we remember we were once loved love kept us alive * Then every face was like the face of God…

In the Shining Book it says Moses existed before he existed at first above in the spirit world and then among us like a light * child of the Blessed Holy One who is a man of war and child of the Blessed Holy One the glamorous moon divine mother and lover, this, this—light that…