7.14 / December 2012

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_14/Molly.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Henry Smith. John Fleet. Their names meant little to my mother and so she would comingle them, if she even bothered to call them anything. Her apathy was echoed in the maps they made. My home has been recorded in English as, variously, Nacotchtank, Nacothtant, Nacostine, Anacostine, Anaquashtank.

It’s a risky business, dressing myself. Naked, I am least exposed. I was built from the outside in, swaddled early in soft, fibrous love grafted onto my raw bones in tight stitches, so I could bear myself upright. Now, it’s difficult. Every morning, I find my seams have gaped.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_14/Nison.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] As you open the apartment building’s cracked glass door for the first time in sixteen days, unbutton the top button of your shirt.  That’s better.  You looked like a religious girl with your shirt closed up to your neck that way.  One more button now.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_14/Milner.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] During sex, a herd of spavined horses                runs through my body and out                               my mouth. You just roister, lover,                                              never see the andalusians on the sheets, palominos                vaulting the bedstead.

Yep, the frog was definitely on the thorn. Squirming. Right there, just by the other shore, alongside a Mountain Dew bottle and some mossy stones. Who wants to see such a thing? Oh, what a doomed frog. Dangling basically by its own skin. I said, Frog, try not to think about where you are going.

At night, I wake up, and Daddy’s in the bathroom with a hanger in his mouth. Momma stands beside him, puts a hand on his cheek, his head, prays for healing, but he bats her hand away, tells her she’s hurting him more. I watch Daddy pull, eyes closed, spit, pull again.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_14/Bolin.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Early autumn, I go on the narrow path that extends from my backyard between two apartment houses to the fence surrounding the vacant lot.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_14/Bestwick.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Grandpa had a chin cut from solar flare, his arms felled comet tail, his mouth full of Hubble lens teeth. Nothing broke him, not the bricklaying or bread crumbs, not a love wanting to see the size of its shadow.

The Head Is Shorn The head is shorn and bristling and once you look at the neat row of staples cinching skin closed above the hairline, it is hard to look away: the metal teeth glint like a zipper sewn shut and the skin holds no pucker on either side of the seam: this is

A Streak of Light In the shower, you wash my back and at the same time you sing the Spider-Man theme song. The soap foams, webs across me. From our window we see the kaleidoscopic lights of the hotel sign. They are singing in bursts. And the day has decided to end itself in rain.