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Drown on all fours Pennies from a box flood the frump market Blasts of nacre, triage under weather’s speckled pool The idée fixe never happens yet can’t be ignored Still the moon is half full? Speak for yourself with your hands up The search is on Search and destroy, if you will Elimination starting with a lit fuse Vacuumed anon Your pleasure is the lee shore Thunder smites the tundra’s paw This should be memorable Legs whited out The runners advance

best thought, you had taught me — a river runs through it, the foot of the soul standing stubbornly in the freeze, all the shards of ice crumpling up the banks, what survives in the ignorance. Play it away. Be ceremony. Be a lit candle to what blows you. Outside, the sun gives a favorite present, mountain nests in ironic meadows, otter takes off her shoes, the small hands of her feet reaching, reaching; still, far away people are dying. Crisp one dollar bills fold another life. You taught me to care in the moment, carve day into light, or something, moving in the west that doesn't destroy us. Look again, in the coming summer, the cruelest month alive still eats up the hours. Regret is an uneven hand, a rough palm at the cheek — tender and calloused. I drink another glass of water, turn on the tap for what grows, for you, for what lasts, for the last and the first found thought of you.

we went into a market—they call it a grocery—and you can’t imagine. fruit brilliant as magazine photos. all kinds of different oranges, grapefruits, mandarins, some tiny clementines with a blue sticker—Morocco—they’ve come so far...the eggs are painted with colors corresponding to the days of the week you’re supposed to eat them: a different color for each opportunity. i felt dizzy, the gulf between myself and this place seemed insuperable. tears welled up in my eyes, i wanted desperately to flee, to get outside so i could breathe. i wanted to explain to Phillis, the North American who had invited me, what was happening to me. i tried, but she couldn’t understand: you have to have felt it yourself: the first time. for the first time my mind had crossed over five hundred years of development at jet speed and arrived in the future, a cold future, its display cases filled with artificial snow and artificial heat. there were a thousand things i never knew existed, a panoply of brand names and gadgets for every purpose. i felt like someone from the stone age, and realized most people on the planet never know the era they’re living in, any more than they could know the quantity of living matter in this galaxy that surrounds us, or the milky complexity of the molecules in their own brains, and what’s more they don’t know that they’ll die without ever knowing. i felt terror of that gloss, of the waxed fruit, of propaganda so refined it could dilute the existence of the strange things before my eyes, other sensations: everything wanting to be used up, immediately, licked, tasted, eaten, packaged, mastered. i knew i couldn’t stand this avalanche, this brilliant swarm, for long, these rows on rows of distant faces staring out at me from cardboard boxes. i’d seen nothing singular in the place, no unique thing i could separate out from the amorphous mass of texture and sensation. i began to move closer, imagining i walked with those who have never eaten meat or tasted cow’s milk, who have never nursed except from the teat of a goat. those who have had only wildflowers to chew when the winter hunger comes. i approached closer still, imagining i walked with the salty ones, who collect their water from the public pipe. my nose began to bleed and Phillis said it was the cold; i knew that wasn’t the problem. we were near the seafood display, i moved closer. fish have always aroused in me both horror and desire. i moved closer, like a lost child feeling her way through space toward something of hers that’s hidden. i brushed the shells with my fingertips, they were smooth and delicate, but obviously artificial, made to be used once and thrown away. at first touch they might seem real, pearly, perfect, but they’re actually plastic, and they’ve never even seen any sea.

After the dread tales and red yarns of the Line Anything might have come to us; but the divine

First turn to me after a shower, you come inside me sideways as always in the morning you ask me to be on top of you, then we take a nap, we’re late for school you arrive at night inspired and drunk, there is no reason for our clothes we take a bath and lie down facing each other, then later we turn over, finally you come we face each other and talk about childhood as soon as I touch your penis I wind up coming you stop by in the morning to say hello we sit on the bed indian fashion not touching in the middle of the night you come home from a nightclub, we don’t get past the bureau next day it’s the table, and after that the chair because I want so much to sit you down & suck your cock you ask me to hold your wrists, but then when I touch your neck with both my hands you come it’s early morning and you decide to very quietly come on my knee because of the children you’ve been away at school for centuries, your girlfriend has left you, you come four times before morning you tell me you masturbated in the hotel before you came by I don’t believe it, I serve the lentil soup naked I massage your feet to seduce you, you are reluctant, my feet wind up at your neck and ankles you try not to come too quickly also, you dont want to have a baby I stand up from the bath, you say turn around and kiss the backs of my legs and my ass you suck my cunt for a thousand years, you are weary at last I remember my father’s anger and I come you have no patience and come right away I get revenge and won’t let you sleep all night we make out for so long we can’t remember how we wound up hitting our heads against the wall I lie on my stomach, you put one hand under me and one hand over me and that way can love me you appear without notice and with flowers I fall for it and we become missionaries you say you can only fuck me up the ass when you are drunk so we try it sober in a room at the farm we lie together one night, exhausted couplets and don’t make love. does this mean we’ve had enough? watching t.v. we wonder if each other wants to interrupt the plot; later I beg you to read to me like the Chinese we count 81 thrusts then 9 more out loud till we both come I come three times before you do and then it seems you’re mad and never will it’s only fair for a woman to come more think of all the times they didn’t care

She was my Sunday school teacher when I was just seven and eight. He was the newly hired pastor, an albino, alarming sight with his transparent eyelashes and mouse-pink skin that looked like it might hurt whenever she caressed his arm. Since Eva was her name, to my child’s mind it made great sense that she should fall in love with him. He was Adán. Before the Fall and afterward, her invert twin. And she, Eva, was blonde as well, though more robust, like Liv Ullmann. I loved her honey hair, her full lips; her green eyes a nameless sin. (Not that I worried all that much— the church was Presbyterian.) In Sunday school, her way to teach us kids to pray was to comment on all the beauty we could touch or see in our environment. My hand was always in the air to volunteer my sentiment. Since other kids considered prayer a chore, the floor was usually mine. My list of joys left out her hair but blessed the red hibiscus seen through the windows while others bowed their heads. Her heart I schemed to win with purple prose on meringue clouds. —For who was Adán, anyway, I thought, but nada spelled backward? While hers, reversed, called out,Ave! Ave! The lyric of a bird born and airborne on the same day. But it was night when I saw her outside the church for the last time: yellow light, mosquitoes, summer. I shaped a barking dog, a fine but disembodied pair of wings with my hands. She spoke in hushed tones to my parents. The next day I would find myself up north, in a strange house, without my tongue and almost blind, there was so much to see. This caused Cuba, my past, to be eclipsed in time, but Eva stayed, a loss. Ave, I learned, meant also this: Farewell! I haven’t seen her since.

In the end, he has to teach them everything, even death, as he finds them that night by the fire, giggling and buzzing more like brother and sister than father and mother, waiting for him to bring meat for the evening meal, not noticing the gore matting the hair to his arms and chest, no more surprised than the first time they'd laid eyes on him when he'd slipped like a small, thrashing gift from the net of his mother. For days, they'd left him in the same place where he'd fallen, alone, around him a pile of rotting fruit they kept adding to. His cries had puzzled then delighted them until he finally grew weary of their laughter and of waiting and crawled to where his mother lay by the fire, his nose knowing the way to her dugs, untended, leaking and already sour, and he'd clamped his jaw down so hard he tasted blood in the first warm suck, this act taken not so much in anger or in hunger, but as a way to announce his presence. Now, they blink at him through the flames, and he isn't sure they even know which of the two he is. When he explains, they nod yes, smiling, as if he were the herald of a new mystery, a coming storm or a fire in the mountains. When he leads them to where his brother lies a dry, broken stalk among the rocks, they nod again, still smiling but unsure now, so he must lift his brother again, cradle his shallow bones against his chest, the head worn into the nook under his neck, and draw the knife again, just as he's done a thousand times before, always as if in practice not for the murder itself, but for this dumb show for mother and father. The blade finds the wound, flicks past his own throat, and he hears again the sound a soul makes leaking from a body, but there is no blood this time, he must give them all, blood and thunder and retribution, he must teach them everything, even life, so only when he hurtles out into the night does he hear the first cry, his, not theirs, the sobs rippling out, lapping over and through him, until they are enormous, pitiless, no longer his, but the maw of a god who will damn but never devour him.

(January 7, 1915) In the dregs of the year, all steam and rain, In the timid time of the heart again, When indecision is bold and thorough, And action dreams of a dawn in vain, I saw high up over Bloxham vale The ploughshare tilt to the next long trail, And, spying a larder in every furrow, The wagtails crowd like a dancing hail! A second wonder there on the hill: Beneath the hedge, I saw with a thrill The budding primroses laugh good-morrow From a deep cradle rocked by a rill! Wagtail smart in his belted blue, Primrose paying her gold ere due,— (Out upon Winter! Down with Sorrow!) These are the things that I know are true.

Look at them flit Lickety-split Wiggling Swiggling Swerving Curving Hurrying Scurrying Chasing Racing Whizzing Whisking Flying Frisking Tearing around With a leap and a bound But none of them making the tiniest tiniest tiniest tiniest tiniest sound

fish carcass say hello to pork rind + arborio rice while castaway caraway puree returns home to deconstruct wilted carrot from its butter + herb remnants fish carcass say goodbye to a knife fight between under-marinated onion slice + wasted redbor kale amidst a gun battle between grilled salmon + paprika fish carcass say goodnight to electrolytes + magnesium as a chemical imbalance takes place inside the borderline cod meat fish carcass say good morning to anti-griddle + orange liqueur whose pre-conditional love for salt + bitterness reminiscent of caviar + pancetta vinaigrette has put quail eggs under the cloche fish carcass say midday to emu eggs while the sun twirls inside a decadent basket of fish sauce without making the plastic mattress, walk-in refrigerator, + bacon sabayon feel left out fish carcass say cloud nine say egginess say shell-shocked say cornichon say it angelo say italian meringue say calf liver say republic of georgia say lavash say turnpike turnips say succotash say yuzu marmalade say overcooked quail say chef teah evans say fish head say into a barrel say bacon fat say baby corn say flavor profile say with victory say the gods are with me say no guts no glory say did not materialize say story on a plate