9.3 / March 2014

Bring me an escutcheon and a field.

You aim more toward arousal when it should be knowledge. Remember in Genesis, when the gods refer to sex they use the word know. Do you think you know me? Try and kiss me like you don’t. Rub the ridges of my neck like Braille, so you can read the words my mouth can’t speak.

Anteater Gods look like anteaters but are small, the size of ants, and they are notoriously difficult to capture, performing tiny miracles of deception to elude the world around them.

They appeared suddenly, as if out of thin air: two men covered in filth, long of beard and tooth.

Russian acrobats twirled Darlene and me high above their heads. The silver sequins of their costumes cast a kaleidoscope of dancing lights across the walls of my living room—fireplace blazing behind for full-theatrical effect. We had met the Russians earlier that day at Harbourfront, part of an Around the World celebration.

You say ghosts drifted into the suitcase you carried from Venezuela to the country where my cheekbones pressed against linen.

In eighth grade, I got busted for selling Bubble-Yum out of my backpack. I sold the five pieces for a quarter each, but they’d outlawed gum, and that’s what they busted me for.

What crude thing wells up in us when called upon will burn black smoke out of the train we stored away all those years ago buried with us as we settled by the billions at the bottom of the barrels by which we would one day measure our excuse to look inward to ask what

In that dream where I meet his ex-lover, I am alone in his bed when she finds me and he is in the other room. She wakes me by pulling down my underwear slowly. I recognize her once I feel her mouth against the inner folds of me.

I find his body in a ditch more compelling                                                                              than any surreal argument.

My son Felix carries salt packets in his back pocket for good luck. He is eight years old and already assumes the worst of things. Always has, in fact.

In my dream, wet as an oil spill, I sweat drops of you, speak in fever gag tongues, tape pearling at my mouth, sticky aphrodisiac pulling the skin from my lips. I blow you kisses like fly paper.

16. Is the unity of terror and ecstasy a reasonable approximation of love?