Poetry

the wife folds her arthritic body onto a shelf, a raccoon / squeezing her backfat thin as water only flexible bones / and silt filling her jello mold of pleated skin

I imagine a glitch: corroded wires, infinite loops of fritz-stuttered signals declaring that every day is August 5th, so every day the machine sings, celebrates itself alone

Backs of knees are pornographic. But openly hairier. My alien agrees with me. Or, at least, its sequins flash an affirmative when prompted.

In life, we are playing with dangerous games: you, the witness of the visiting vatnajökull now blushing pink in the atom sky with the bright comedy of Frigg fooling the ashes of the colour, and I, making a cryogenic favour to the moonless nights

In December of 2015, a giant squid swam into Toyama Bay in Japan. A local dive shop owner guided the squid back out to the ocean. The squid clung to the diver’s body using its legs' suckers. Later, the diver said the squid was “unexpectedly beautiful, its body glowing red.”

After midnight I see it coming: a finale marked in gravel and salt. I / come down for sinner’s stripes, wear these clothes like queens do, / take the stairs slowly, out of the flood and into blue. This is what / the sun is for; still in the night I collect stars and I collect bees and I / keep them in mason jars, like little yellow dreams, my magic.

Before the hurricane, we had a rosebush. An avocado tree. Limes. The backyard, where we hid plastic Easter eggs, buried the bones of small pets.

auditory and visual hallucinations, she explains casually, as if describing the weather of California in July.

The tapestry must be frailed if it is to survive, flipped over