He was forced to eat a star, although all he wanted was bread. All he wanted was to be normal, but he was pre-determined by the Butcher Shop to have his limbs chopped…
Issue I
No Possum
One grows tired of killing snakes, gutting lizards, crushing spiders. My furniture is full of death; there are bones in the walls. They don’t speak nearly enough. The carpet is an ocean where I am lost all the time. Outside the window, blue dust stirs in the wind. Further, the wild screams of children eat up the air…
Polichinelle
You have taken my bones, yet charge me with the crime—then laugh at me because I walk funny; failing to mention the extraordinary willpower I exercise in order to walk without bones—
Then, you want me to forgive you, after these biological…
Prose Without Meaning
A boy claps his hands and two clay pigeons come to life and fly off into nowhere—Nazarene. Nazarene is too full of blood, too full of nothingness—
no way out except the way you came;
and I’m too old to understand…
Sutil Point
The Sound swept deep around the Point,
piles of driftwood
splayed like fingers
to the sky. White boats…
Tiesu Road
From the copse, the path climbed towards the road beside the farm.
Grass brushed his fingers, his steel bucket sloshed with clams
and sea water. All afternoon, he’d dug in the soupy charcoal sand,
while across…
Darling
The smell. It infiltrates. It arrives sooner than you anticipate. It always comes first. You begin sniffing drifts of it a few miles out, and as the boat draws close—I’d try to describe it but a word’s a speck of dust and this smell is a whole different world.
A Frenchman in New Orleans once told me freshly dug truffles reek of sex and soil, oil and ash, sweat and citrus. The odor on Jarvis Island doesn’t need you. Been fine alone a million years or more, and wasn’t till fifty-six did President Pierce think to stick a flag in its silver dollar stench.
Remember those Louisiana peaches we worked picking one summer? Made good money and could talk all day while we did. Good chance those trees were grown with guano. Good chance that guano got dug on Jarvis, God’s last rock tossed careless into blue Pacific oblivion. Good chance a cormorant might rest upon that rock, weary from its westward flight. Good chance a thousand might. I see a flock now amassed upon a petrified cliffedge, their sharp caws blended into one blank drone. Watch them fly. Their long black wings waver like rippled satin, their white bellies flash and vanish as they dive through the darkened evening sky. They are falling confetti, the blink of stars…
The River Acheron
The River Acheron is one of the rivers of the Underworld in Greek mythology, also known as the River of Woe.
Here I am again—pen to paper, at last.
Ask me not of the darkness in my heart,
nor of the grime that cakes these soles of glass—
a broken porcelain doll with missing parts.
The Ripped Soul
In memory of our greatest regret
Knelt on the ground that encases—
neglected, yet not forgotten—
the bigger chunk of my remnants:
a severed soul of fallen graces.
My City, My City
For Karachi, my beloved
You can hate my city—my city with its murky seawaters
and unsafe, ill-lit streets.
You can leech off the money
and pour it all into the Province of Five Streams.