ISSUE 11

in the beginning there was a bird, and the bird came

          with the voice of a rushing storm, and all the

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things that the storm passed through became statues,

          things black as the thin coating of silhouettes

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so that remembrance became the vestiges of bolts

          of cropped light,

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and laughter could not leap past the candle smoke.

          meanwhile, a parrot is crying across the shelf.

 

there is a torn chapter in the book where a bartender

          is seen photographing our locked arms

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I hiss into an empty room and watch memory cough

          a flowing thing that resembles a rivulet into my

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embrace–

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the moon punctures my back with a yellowing of

          warm light– a vase shape-shifting

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through organic milkweeds. in describing the brunette

          whose voice is a red piano

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I lean into the music of the impermanence of things.

          if you listen more to the stones under rushing water,

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if you force a finger down the dark hallways of your

          throat and pore over the elasticity of

 

friendship, the haunted sheets of knowing will smudge

          the fossil-red breadth of caravan

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          to own our kind of fire is to wound the universe

at its floodgates of flushing light–

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