9.12 / December 2014

At any moment, one of us is liable to meltdown. See: the rounded tower in France with its blistered God Particle. Fly. Now see: pre-dawn Brooklyn rainstorm. If I could just keep my eyes closed, I tell myself, but then my daughter says, Technically, saying the same word twice makes a rhyme.

I was waiting for the end, and when it didn’t come I took up crochet. I wove a blanket of steel wool I kept in the den to warm my enemy who any day might show up on my stoop asking to spend the night.

under a streetlamp on the back of my pickup truck with sugar on our tongues and fucked up fathers between us, you smiled sideways with that slipping happiness you hide behind your walk

In my family, we talk about sex at the dinner table. Over the meals my stepfather orchestrates, a kind of making love, my mother casually enquires who I’m fucking these days.

It all starts the night you floss a spider out of your teeth. You’re not sure how it got there. One minute you are flicking white pieces of unidentified food matter from your receding gum line; the next you have flung a small black spider onto the mirror.

It was like he wanted to own you from the inside out. He fingered you in the front seat of his truck all the way from the nursing home to the duplex. He was waiting for you when you got off work.

If these legs could talk they’d tell you about Munich. They’d say ‘Paris. No one says Paris anymore.’ They’d take you on a slow voyage across the channel from Hoek van Holland to Harwich, drinking all night with a red-faced East German man who couldn’t hear nor speak.

Even as he touched me, I knew he was the word made flesh.

The institution guarantees a frumpy contravariant.

after Eduardo C. Corral Sometimes, the memory of him playing runs backwards. The notes leave the room, return to the end of his instrument, back to his body. I close my eyes and see him making reeds at his workbench. He sharpens the knife on the spinning wheel, the blade glowing.

Once—very seriously—Sylvia considered that predictable thing: smashing the windows of his car.

Millie jumps as Never’s hand grabs her wrist in the dark. Amid the rough maize stalks, he pulls her close, and her cheek smashes against his chest.

So I wait on Angel Island, this island of immortals. The grass is dry and golden, waves scour the headlands, and the sea churns around me.