You are very deep in an ocean. If you swimyou can live a full lifewhile drowning. You will get marriedto a bottlenose dolphinand wear a coral ring. You will give birthto yourself,but it will be so tinythat you lose itin the water. Your love will die firstand you will be alone.You are a brave little…
Category: Magazine Content
The Woman I Love
I can’t be certainBut I have a suspicionThat the woman I loveHas turned into a lizard.Last night in bedI brushed her thighAnd thought I feltA crinkled lizard’s hide.She had a crest instead of hair.A lizard’s tongue Darted from her mouth–It happened so quickly I barely spotted itBut I’m pretty sure it was there.I know it…
An Ending
I finally told Allison I loved her yesterday after they told us the world was going to end. I meant it. She told me she loved me too, but I think she just told me that because they told us the world was going to end. She hesitated a second too long between the syllables….
The Climbing Accident
Tragic.The way she dug into him hard with her crampons, her ice pick,working her little cleat to numbness against some pointed part of his anatomy: rise & fall, rise & fall, rise &fall, as deep in that dark room from which old childrenhad once emerged, she felt only the T-bar of pharmaceutical barrenness pressing against…
Blurring
“Blurring” was previously published in The Cathach Take off your coat.Let it fall from you.I want to watch you do that.I’ve been thinking of you too much.Now, I want to make you real.Do that and come here,Take off yourself and hang it on me.Fall from yourself and don’t think.Stop talking.To name this momentIs to sap…
Ticking Clock
Why did I walk through that door? I think you know. I came to see you. I forget how it ended last night. I remember wine and laughing. We examined paintings by Dali. Then came news of the ticking clock, more of a lecture really. Did you go to bed happy? Sad? If it was…
City of Glass
One morning we woke to find the citycomposed entirely of glass, prismaticin the low sun glancing off sharp edges.Not one object remained that had not bledits colour into the ground in the night.From the deep shock-proof shells of officesto the etched headlines on delicate sheetsof stacked papers, everything was washed clear.Only the pavements, foundations and…
Fifteen
My bedroom is full of ghosts and glow in the dark stars I glued to the ceiling when I was fifteenand in sort-of love with a girl who smiled a mouth full of metal,the brackets of her braces alternatingher favourite colours: pink purple pink purple pink purple. I exhaled perfect O’s with a cigarette I…
Sweepers
Manhattan. They bought the island for beads and built it up into a forest of steel and glass. I used to spit in executives’ cobb salads at the cafeteria, listen to them talk about eating little companies, and look out over their shoulders at all the buildings spiking up, gray, white, and shining, like they…
Holiday
He asked a simple thing: go for a ride in his car, just around the park’s edge, just this once. I was a girl who felt guilty refusing. We drove along the park in a slow dissolve, like an ice cube on a finger. I watched children my age surround a boy with a gold…