The Afterlife: In the Summer House
A scrap of canvas tacked to the kitchen wall
reads, in Russian and English:
AT THE DARK TIME
PULL OUT THE CORD.
Fuck the Carburetor
I was just out of high school.
Yes, I said, I am a bookkeeper,
when I’d had only one year of
numbers a few decimals short
of failure.
The Fire This Time
how much damn broke
does it take to want to
burn just before class
lung green with chaos
My 88-Year-Old Mother-in-Law Decides to Make New Year’s Resolutions
and I want to say, oh, Rose, why? but there’s no way to pass the prime
rib and pretend the words You’ll be dead soon enough aren’t standing
behind her, waiting to be said.
Picnic
Ghazals have always struck me as a literary picnic—a checkerboard blanket brimming with many different dishes composed of unique couplets. This modified, collaborative ghazal, with its ‘No-Thing-ness’ whimsicality served up alongside more serious stanzas, unpacks a memorable conversation for us all under the summer afternoon sun.
Parking Meter
If a slot machine is a one-armed bandit,
what does that make you? A cyclopean
troll? I don’t think it will catch on.