the fee is neither hair nor father’s bones, not feather or a kiss or a firstborn promised. what he takes is money. he who deals in this kind of curse is frugal, pragmatic, and gods help you if you think it might…
i’m standing by the chair. then i’m sitting in it. then i’m in it, not sitting, not standing. i’m in the chair the way a bird is in the air: unnoticed, natural, nominal. directives descend: detailed, demanding. cords click into contacts. conduits…
territory’s truly marked by only one thing: presence. those who linger are landed, those who merely loiter are but peasants. so though to the uninitiate these pieces seem bulwarks for a border, we know what they master is a magic of another…
(we met in a maze at a masquerade: she was b[o|a]red, and i was belted.) there was birdsong on the breeze the morning after we first melted. we marked each other on the inner skin, where finials from fingertips don’t fade. fiery…
“they told me,” she told me, “it’s never mattered a whit which song they sang. they could parody a polka and still instill all pirates with that pang. their promise isn’t parceled out in poetry or rhyme; the tempo is what tenders…
from boreal border, where trunks crowd in tight, to tundra-touching taiga under midnight day and midday night, stretches winter-fir[m] far-reaching forest, the spiraling spread of the [s]pine. it’s there where Douglas found his false-hem’s lock, where spruce and cedar cede little space…
by a breath of bad blood breaking in an amniotic alcove, we were trained to trade the taking for the sea[son]’s surface, s[e]ated. we admired mighty mirrors with our held-out hands atrembling, and our questions sounded queerer the more rapidly repeated. i…