Leaving my body as a child took me beyond this orbit — I am so rooted now, roots themselves are part of my fabric. I am awash with greens & browns — more rhizome than reason. And in the dark vow of this coming disappearance I try to be there for ‘others’ whose lives I touched above ground. We still have mouth, teeth, bones & red tongues that flap…

When I remember each life is equal in value, I find peace. — “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” F.Scott Fitzgerald. Hands up who’d like to be a genius? I don’t suppose any of us would mind. But is it innate…

Saints walk among us. Sometimes, you’re in the same room — Clothes are pressed & folded placed neatly in three columns on an old sideboard like centurions in tight formation. Drawers are full but she keeps turning up with new shirts. I just don’t have enough bodies to wear them. ‘I just thought you’d look good in this,’ she says. A friend says I never had it so good. ‘It’s…

After we had passed mid-summer & the sun began to impale itself on the rising dark — she came for the last light to tell us about the end of her marriage trembling with its bloody necessity hard met by clumsy shards of our happiness scorching the table — its comet illumined each…

Why do we manage disasters yet collapse at the slightest word? — I always get the bayleaf, the knot of unsolved garlic on my plate. You say it doesn’t matter but we fight until dawn, incrementally. We’re just an ordinary couple — it’s the small things that offend — disasters we ride out like two saints in the vacuum of our roomy house. The therapist says when I…

A dry palm on a cool white page. I begin like this — touching — writing — is this Heaven? & I know you insist I put down objects — lists to litter, to quicken the mind of the reader flooding her with an enormity of feeling. Though I am tempted — we have a problem brought on…

You put on your headphones, you close your eyes — It’s not a booth, it’s not private in that way but those black leatherette headphones are enough to pretend. If you squeeze your eyes you are nearly there — you can make it through another day. The guitarist from The Pretenders is working in the shop & you will later buy your…

I saw you change when money found its way downstream — I watched you fetch water in pails when you were poor — but when money came like an unexpected guest the water moved inside your body. I thought, how congruent you are. How true it is — the body keeps the score. I saw it as a boy. …

A meat grinder’s yoked to the table — tight in its metal clamp so my young hands can offer it the sacrifice it demands. A virgin going in feet first. Flour and salt cover the Formica top sea foam on blue pale & the women talk how to keep everything just so —…