when her heart beat, I was home, and nothingneeded changing. the clouds retched sunlightthrough the halls; she threw the blinds and howled. all along the cul-de-sac, the painted bright homessmiled; our house grew greyer, grander by thehour. the plumbing dripped red mornings, ductsgasped afternoons: the tissue shreds of words she’dthought of saying. the walls were …
A little wormwood in the cakes, a pinchOf brick dust in the tea, the candles burnAnd senses yearn, the planchette hovers, inchBy inch. Each letter is a word to earn. Meaning’s hidden, dead are bidden, the clothUpon the table puckers. Sounds of mothsFlicker patter. Bejeweled fingers grip soCold. Graveyard mold and earthy scents that slow …
The opposite of a body, but in a body. In where blood is, and marrow,and everything around and in between. To live without living in between fingernails and flesh. To operate a body towards want, and only want.The opposite of breath and metal, all lack, and navigating above concrete in a body walking across the …
The world is astonishingI feel it with my bodyDo you hear me? I feel it with my whole bodyYour mind is in your eyesYour feet and your guts,In the darkness of holes and in your eyes. It Follows that your mind is in your shit,That decreation is evolutionarily as important as your kids and …
Hometown, ghetto, Auschwitz, Los Angeles, the whole megillah.They sent a wonderful kid to get me and Gigi on the tape.This girl says we’re amazing, not just Gigi and me, all the survivors,the Holocaust survivors. I really want to help her. I’m reading then a book, PT Barnum: America’s Biggest Showman.PT Barnum had Siamese twins, Chang …
Tell me when she dies, he says.Tell me when the prisoner breathes her last.I will scream her name from the rooftops andspray-paint her likeness on every wall;light a candle in her honor,engrave her parting words onto every front page.I will be her architectand rebuild a dust-streaked life from the broken temple of her past— beam by …
Stand here and become a treeSift the loam with your toesTalk to the birds in your branching mindStand here and leave eternityDrab concern of mayfly humansHold the skies in your fingers outstretchedTalk to insects, sing the day,Sing morning with feathered familiars, sing night asBats cry, as owls wing, intentStand here and face everywhereBecome a world …
In the first spring I hide from the plague in a pale rain above Schet-cheet-qua-chub,fading into the timber at the end of the world.I owed that hill something, even before it hid me,and I think it took it.łaska khalakwati-stik, łaska t’uɁan,they are older and harder than meand they can take damn near anything(except chainsaws) casting …
In this time of masks I can touch only land,open the green book where warm feet wrotelines of desire. I need stranger maps now.I will comb the ghost-tilth with my hands,wake the past from its red-clay bed. I go shoeless between dead and quick,mazing blood-spoor, pressing skin-warmed coinsinto the earth until the birds hush and …
“I tend to refer to most of it as the territory of Ghost Soil. It certainly isn’t a narrow genre. Whatever you call it, it should dance away from easy definition. […] [F]or me, part of it was a knowing that given the way the national narrative was going, this vital space was going to …
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