ONLINE ISSUES

8.06 / June 2013


The Day Before Easter

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_6/Easter.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The day before Easter my boyfriend tried to kill me on a slippery highway in the middle of the night.

An Accent Like Grief

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_6/Grief.mp3″ text=”listen to this piece” dl=”0″] From early on I’ve learned to hear accents like auditory Braille, bumps in language forming landscapes. Whenever my mother speaks in English it’s apparent she is anything but. One linguistic turn of the tongue is enough to identify some of us as other.

Three Poems

Bruise [wpaudio url=”/audio/8_6/Hoffman1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] She’s been hard used by her gods, who ink maps with scratch and bruise on her thighs and forearms of countries she could save.

Victory Music

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_6/Older.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] One of my favorite moments ever was when the boy called me an Arab and you said, “She’s Sikh, fucknut” and then when he said “Oh, like hide and go-“ you broke his nose.

Three Poems

Ritual [wpaudio url=”/audio/8_6/Ritual.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Let’s write a hypothetical. Let’s write a wall that’s impermeable but through which you can still feel the contours of, say, breasts. The wall is solid (not like a curtain) with (non-soundproof) insulation. Transparent.

Three Poems

The Boys at the Warhol Museum Mouths made for Super 8, clavicles and elbows racketing brimful with the grain of basement porn, flash of wrist luminescent as a blowjob: galleries of silver clouds and skinny jeans. The things I want to tell you all start with rain.

The Paste-and-Scissors Man

  The paste-and-scissors man has demands morning, noon, and night. He wants me to tell him everything, and then he wants me to tell him more. “You fucking blackhole,” I call him. I keep hoping obscenity might work, obscenity with a twist.

Five Poems

Translating Ashes I was not born good but in the likeness of my father. A man full of ashes who loved tanks as a boy and knew life through a dream.

Two Poems

Hunting There is a place in this field where the rabbit has been caught. By a hound and her rough lick. The rabbit’s heart became a circus of sound. And the hound could feel the chest parade— wanted to taste peanuts in farmers pockets, watch children leap through hoops and air.

Tiquana and the Loon

“The peril of our existence is that our diet consists entirely of souls.” -Inuit proverb   I wish that I could tell you this. I wish that you could hear the ice that thunders on the bay at night like cannon fire.

Two Poems

Rosie Kyle has a new motorbike, Rosie dreamt about giving him a hand job. It went all over his hand and face and afterwards he said thanks, I suppose. She came home from work and found him covering his bike, in preparation for tomorrows snow.

Five Poems

Scientific Method I found a small bump on my wrist and inside it a profusion of eggs. Each egg screamed out for love. Every thing is a kind of center. Scientific Method There is a God particle and it has promised to tell us everything.