Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

Rite of Recall

in the fairy grove my hand is warmed
by Martyn’s   we’re always
meeting at a conference on vampires
where emergency fire doors hold in coffee’s
bitter scent, tea steam, and a very nice bean salad

we’re always walking
through Central Park at dusk
smelling roses & pansies
of the Shakespeare Garden
we didn’t find that time

and I bring him to the top of Fuji
where we shiver into each other until light
and I bring him to the top of Tai Shan
to show him that red sky I remember
deserving its reputation and its hundreds
who climb or take the ropeway

his hand like crinkling leaves
filters out the horrors, yes horrors
there’s nothing else to call it
when a man you loved has raped you
when strangers hold a knife
against your soft belly for cash

under the hawthorn we’re building
words for Francis Bacon & Edward Hopper
we’re building a home on the edge of loneliness
left since we’re together
to the ashy snow

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My poem just recently published in The Smoking Poet crystallized around the sight of white sails against a red sunset sky (at the risk of sounding cliche, most red seems blood red to me these days, though there are varieties of blood) viewed from the Kirkland waterfront. I had been thinking about Adam Zagajewski‘s Try to Praise the Mutilated World (I think someone had posted it to their Facebook page). The image of the wound-mouth which is becoming something of a leitmotif in my work is ekphrastic in origin, an image-idea that has been haunting me thanks to the work of Francis Bacon and by Gilles Deleuze’s take on it.

An accident occurred somewhere in transmission or in the saving of the file and the breaks between stanzas were lost. I decided to leave it that way, however, as it emphasized the rushed flow of thought on thought, impression following hard upon impression.

Read No Private Shattered World now.