for warmth, to lineate a private space, to brace a roof, frame a window, adorn with photos, a diploma. Question them otherwise: why the need for this side and another? for height to daunt a climb? Consider the utility— and the inevitable ruins they all become.
My husband and I had a fight today about pictures—I never like the ones of me, and that pisses him off. My negativity pisses him off. In any picture taken right now, or a few days ago, or last year, I always think I look old, or tired. But tonight, I am poring over …
Take yellow—new flame flickering cool out of scrap. Or lemon: fruit implying flower, implying branch— fuel for a hotter fire to smoke the cloudless night with citrus. Sour candies in cellophane, stashed in the back of Grandma Tucker’s silver drawer, first place to look after the long drive— the old Volvo’s water pump …
The river is always there even when he doesn’t see it for weeks because he’s busy milking cows and scooping pig shit and piling fieldstone into a wall along the low end of their property, — something to slow erosion, something to make it all last a bit longer — and his dog …
sit in a bowl next to the photo that looks black and white, its vastness lost in atmospheric haze, him wrapped in grey light. A distant lighthouse pulsating through the fog, a premonition from some unknowable shore, before the nights laced with heroin became interlocked with days, turning years into decades, dragging him …
Brown salty water foams and surges through the narrow slit forty feet deep past the sandy nose of Little Gasparilla, the empty weathered frame of the unfinished house on its beach. No one is here to see the grim parade coming in with the tide. Red grouper with bulging eyes, line-sided snook, brown …
1. How a bullet can come through a window, land in the dog’s water dish just beside the man standing in the kitchen. On the news they said it seemed to come from nowhere; amazingly, it touched no one on the way. 2. In only one generation, the wings of the swallows …