The snow packed hard and close suffocated every footfall. Wind and knives did not warm our skin. Were we unafraid or unaware of the myriad. The fright of rabbits who would eat their young with jaws not meant for such fierce things. Or the sight to keep our fangs. I closed her eyes. Her bones [...]

If you are a glorious beast then kick up the dust with alternating heels. Each burst a nest for wasps: the hiccough of earth and folly. Then lower your head. Is it steam that echoes from your nostrils, or evaporated tears, or lovers’ whispers. Devour it all. A skyscraper underfoot ought feel the same as [...]

HARK, THE CLIFF The cliff, bare. A pale shoulder, or did she deceive the crossing of the bridge. It was twisted from twine and coal. And then – without a cry – she might fade into the blessing, the sacred dark. Such crushing weight to slaughter the foal. The lack, in dark, could not be [...]

UNCOMPLICATED GESTURES OF AFFECTION We were, ultimately, unsure of our destination. The maps had flown out of the passenger-side window at eighty-four miles per hour, and the guidebook or constituent parts of the guidebook had been used to stem the flow of blood from the puncture wounds on my right bicep. They were not as [...]

We tied ropes around our waists and swore to follow close. We went into the dark. Down into the dark. What sound, the lack of sound, like a nervous guillotine. Everything I knew I knew through the recollection of the thing, the gathering and regathering of the precious or semiprecious thing. The stairs were carved [...]

Crush the pavement and sing to glare she called over her shoulder as we walked along the trail. It was the afternoon. Lush, and save wedding ring with a stare. I said please. Please clarify. A crunch of branches long-dead seemed to travel to testify, snap the fingers to delineate your years in tune. Which [...]

I am blind she said. I said you lie. I walked out of the room and into the brisk. It was a chalkboard morning, before dawn. When I pulled my cellular phone out of my black jean pocket to check the time, my fingers let slip their hold. The phone cracked upon the concrete. What [...]

I drag coffee-stains from teeth to skin somewhere between Dead Sea scrolls and cappuccino foam. I brush three times a day but I cannot excise the lesion nor should I ever learn the lesson. A girl is such a strange thing. Did I meet her in archaeology or oceanography, or amateur astronomy. A leather cushion [...]

LITIGATION I tried to explain in the plainest terms that I would destroy all things astray to set the stones demarcating safe path. She declined overstatement. The only heat was off her fingers sucked out of the concrete between the weed-crushing cracks and snapping cardboard bones. In eyelashes imprisoned dark blue ink and in the [...]

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF GENGHIS KHAN Transmissible touch sponge the form curved delicate cruel aerated encephalopathy wanders cold and whom to know the variance of crushing grins, goodly leers could lose the grocery list: * song from tape and beat-down down-trod, trod-clod automobile * song therefore lacking in pitch and tone and color and deliberate mechanisms for [...]